In construction, a sustainability questionnaire often contains the same sections: how much material has been consumed and what type, how that material and staff got to the construction site, and what requirements the client itself already sets out in the specification or procurement process. This is no coincidence: these three sections typically generate the most emissions for a construction company, and that is why buyers, banks and contracting authorities ask about them most frequently.
The questions are usually not unique to construction. They are the standard sections of the VSME standard, only filled in with construction terminology: cement and steel instead of 'raw materials', site transport instead of 'business travel'. Anyone who knows which three sections come up will recognise the question faster and also know faster in which document the answer already exists.
Material consumption: what exactly is being asked
On material consumption, a client usually asks about the quantity and type of construction material purchased for a project or over a year: concrete, steel, wood, insulation material. Sometimes the question is about the proportion of recycled material or about an environmental performance calculation, which has been common in construction for other purposes. The latter goes beyond what the VSME standard asks of an SME supplier, and that is precisely the type of question the capcheck on esgia.eu is designed for: it checks whether a question falls within the standard or outside it.
For questions that do fall within the standard, the source is usually the procurement records or supplier invoices. A breakdown by material type with quantities is already available for most construction companies, only not always in the form the questionnaire expects.
Transport to the construction site
The second regular section is transport: how material, machinery and staff get to the construction site. This usually splits into two parts. Own transport, such as company vans and lorries on own fuel, can be traced from fuel receipts or fuel card summaries. Transport by third parties, such as a supplier who delivers the construction materials themselves, is further from the company and is harder to substantiate; the VSME standard asks less detail from an SME at this point than larger reporting companies sometimes ask for initially.
The calculation itself uses established emission factors with a reference date: how much CO2 corresponds to a litre of diesel or a kilometre driven. How that calculation is derived from energy or fuel notes in practice is set out in the overview of topics per situation.
The requirements of the client
The third section is not sustainability in the strict sense, but is often included in the same questionnaire in construction: the client's own sustainability requirements, for example from a specification, a procurement document or a purchasing condition. These can include CO2 performance ladders, circularity targets or the contracting authority's own scoring sheets. These requirements fall outside the supply chain obligation that has applied since March 2026, because that obligation only concerns sustainability information that a reporting company requires from a supplier in the context of its own reporting obligation, not requirements that a client sets out separately in a procurement. Whether a specific requirement falls within or outside that obligation is for the competent supervisory authority or a lawyer to judge; esgia.eu does not provide legal advice on this.
What can be recognised: many of these own requirements ask for the same underlying figures as the standard questionnaire, only in a different format. Once you have built your own file, you do not need to collect those figures again, only present them differently.
Why these three components keep coming back
The reason material use, transport and client requirements appear in almost every construction questionnaire is that together they account for the largest share of the environmental impact of a construction project. For an installation company or contractor working with fixed materials and a limited vehicle fleet, this is usually a manageable set of questions, especially if the underlying documents are already in order: energy bills, fuel receipts and an overview of material purchases.
Whether a specific question in your questionnaire falls within the VSME standard, and which of your own documents are relevant, can be determined with a few questions via the free quick-scan that provides an indication in a few minutes. How esgia.eu handles your data in the process is explained on the privacy and data page, and the procedure from capcheck to dossier is explained step by step on the page on how the platform works.
Do you have a specific construction questionnaire on your desk? Paste the questions into the free capcheck and immediately see which ones apply and which don't, or first read through the topic page for your situation.