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Global GreenTag will help Australian companies go for not only gold but also platinum to help create new green building projects for the next Olympics Games in Brisbane in 2032. 

The Brisbane-based certification company also reveals it has new and more robust certification and declaration programs in development to ensure that building projects for Bris2032 will be able to access products and materials that are healthier and guaranteed to be ethically manufactured.

The roots of the Global GreenTag Product Certification Standard go back to the Sydney 2000 Olympics and its success as the first green built Olympics in history. 

GreenTag’s co-founder, program director and CEO David Baggs was the Sustainability, Materials and Energy Consultant for 10 of the Sydney 2000 Olympic ‘Green Games’ venues and GreenTag grew out of that process. 

Responding to the recent announcement that Brisbane had won the bid to stage the next Olympics in 2032, Baggs said there will plenty of opportunities for Australian companies.

“It is like coming full circle. Global GreenTag evolved out of the work done during the Green Sydney Olympics in 2000 to meet the needs of the emerging green building design teams who were seeking reliable product information that was otherwise unobtainable at the time,” he said.

“With over 16,000 products now under certification, we are now poised alongside the Green Building Council of Australia’s (GBCA) and Brisbane 2032 organisers’ vision to break new records for integrating sustainable products into the new generation of sustainable property.”

Building programs for the Brisbane Olympics will target 6 Green Stars and a Net Carbon Zero future.

Baggs said Global GreenTag and its Green Star recognised certified products will be there to support every project.

He said GlobalGreenTag’s certified products represent over 150 world leading sustainable manufacturers under licence with its certification and declaration programs, most of which have been designed specifically for the building industries to use on projects to align with requirements laid down by the leading green building programs such as Green Star, WELL and LEED.  

Global GreenTag assessors currently rank products and materials for building projects using both the certifier’s GreenRate certification program and its flagship program LCARate - a comparative Life Cycle Assessment system that ranks products for its whole of life cycle impact on the environment with either a Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum rating.

The system was the first of its kind in the world and remains unique today.

“Our vision is to provide certification programs that are continuously evolving and which influence product manufacturers and building professionals to develop not just better solutions but aspire to use the best for our environment,” he said.

Global GreenTag demands 100 per cent transparency from all manufacturers who submit their products for certification or to one of the company’s rigorous declaration programs, like the GreenTag EPD (Environmental Product Declaration), PHD (Product Health Declaration) and its Modern Slavery Declaration for products (the GreenTag MSD).

“Across all of our programs, our investigations of supply chains are rigorous. We look for any signs of environmental impacts and to information, which may suggest that incidents of Modern Slavery are occurring; we cover all corners,” Baggs said.

GreenTag product health assessments, via their PHD program, examine the toxicology of products for their ingredients.

For the benefit of architects, designers, specifiers and procurement teams, the company also provides a HealthRATE scheme, which ranks the ‘healthiness in use’ of each product from Bronze to Silver to Gold and finally to Platinum, the highest ranking for any product and therefore the healthiest product to be using.