DGNB certification with coatings from Adler

Unlike conventional certificates, DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) does not check the quality of individual products or components, but that of the entire building. An important prerequisite for achieving the coveted - and increasingly required - platinum rating is the ecological quality of the building materials. All processed products must be recorded and evaluated in order to achieve the required overall compliance level of 80 percent. Paints, varnishes and wood stains play an important role here, explains Lukas Zilger, architect supervisor for the Austrian paint manufacturer Adler in central and northern Germany: "Coatings form the final layer of the building, so to speak, and therefore particularly high environmental and health requirements apply to them. Accordingly, they also contribute an above-average share to the DGNB rating." At Adler, planners and installers have an easy game in this regard: In the product range of the leading Austrian coatings manufacturer, there is a coating structure for every area of application and every desired appearance that achieves the highest DGNB quality level 4: for wood facades, wood and wood-aluminum windows as well as for interior finishing.

Coating materials are affected by the DGNB criteria in two areas: First, their VOC, or solvent, content is evaluated. "If a surface is coated at the factory - by the window manufacturer or carpenter - all standard water-based coatings from Adler achieve the highest quality level 4, and we can also offer numerous variants in this level for coating on the construction site," explains Lukas Zilger. This also applies to the second evaluation criterion, which looks at impregnation: If the impregnation is equipped with chemical wood protection, quality level 3 is always the upper limit. However, Adler also offers coating structures without wood preservatives for windows and facades, with which it is possible to achieve the often required level 4 and, at the same time, waste wood class 2 for recycling the wood. Gathering all the information required for Platinum certification is a time-consuming and tedious task. That's why Adler has developed a special service: "We have clearly presented all recommended coating structures on our homepage at ," says Zilger. Here, architects and manufacturers can find the right coating concepts for all requirements: For windows, facades and interior finishing, opaque and colored, particularly natural or with a metallic effect. The DGNB rating and waste wood class are listed for each structure - both for factory coating, as is common for windows and mostly also for wood facades, and for on-site coating.