New ISO Standards for Fire Risks, Environmental Impacts of Concrete

Fires often cause severe injuries, deaths, and very costly extensive building damage. It is important that the circumstances that can lead to a fire be managed correctly and preemptively. Recognizing this need, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently released of a new standard for fire prevention and mitigation.

The new ISO standard, ISO 16732-1 (Fire safety engineering – Fire risk assessment – Part 1: General), is intended for fire-safety practitioners to help them evaluate fire risks of all kinds and choose from existing technologies and strategies the most effective in preventing fire.

ISO 16732-1 is another example of a trend where standards are being developed as tools for evaluating systems, such as the environmental management framework ISO 14001 (together with its ISO 14001 training component) which is used to assess an environmental management system (EMS).

ISO 16732-1 supplies a bird’s eye view of fire risk management, the procedural steps in fire risk estimation, and the steps to follow to conduct fire risk evaluation with respect to critical considerations such as regulations, costs, and alternative approaches.

Among the target users of ISO 16732-1 are fire-safety engineers, fire-safety managers, fire-service personnel, public authorities, code developers and enforcers, insurers, and risk managers.

ISO 16732-1 can be used to:

• Assess the balance between the cost and the risk reduction benefit of a proposal
• Establish safety conformity to a code
• Examine acceptable risk specifically for severe events
• Provide general guidance or support choices in the selection of scenarios and other elements
• Support decisions about fire prevention or fire protection of new or existing built environments.

With the environment increasingly getting traction in both public awareness and industry agenda, it is no surprise that the ISO has published yet another ISO standard that gives the beleaguered environment a leg up. This time it is to help the construction industry better manage the environmental effects of its most-used and most-important building material—concrete.

Concrete, an amalgam of cement and aggregates, is a main ingredient in all manner of construction: buildings, bridges, roads, dams, and tunnels. Its use as a resource is the second largest next to the consumption of water, a statistic that can easily have negative impacts on the environment.

ISO 13315-1:2012 (Environmental management for concrete and concrete structures – Part 1: General Principles) is the new international standard that provides the basic rules on environmental management for concrete and concrete structures. It is intended for use by designers, builders, engineers, and those involved in construction. It dovetails with the ISO 14000 series on environmental management.

ISO 13315 supplies a framework and the rules on environmental management associated with concrete and the structures built with it, including the assessment of environmental impacts and some methods for improving the environment. It also addresses the entire life cycle of concrete structures, from design to production to recycling and/or disposal.