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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an established method to assess the various environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a building. The goal of this project was to calculate the environmental releases for a whole office building and investigate the contribution in terms of environmental impact for different parts of the building, as well as the impact from different stages of the life cycle. The construction process was followed up during production and the contractors provided real-time data on the input required in terms of building products, transport, machinery, energy use, etc. The results are presented for five environmental impact categories and, as expected, materials that constitute the main mass of the building and the energy used during operation contribute the largest share of environmental impact. It is usually difficult to evaluate the environmental impact of the materials in technical installations due to the lack of data. However, in this study, the data were provided by the contractors directly involved in the construction and can, therefore, be considered highly reliable. The results show that materials for installations have a significant environmental impact for four of the environmental impact categories studied, which is a noteworthy finding.

To establish a circular economy in society, it is crucial to incorporate life-cycle studies, such as life-cycle assessment (LCA), in the design process of products in order to mitigate the well-recognized problem of the design paradox. The aim of the study was to provide means in a structured way to highlight choice uncertainty present in LCA when used as decision support, as well as to mitigate subjective interpretations of the numerical results leading to arbitrary decisions. The study focused on choices available when defining the goal and scope of a life-cycle assessment. The suggested approach is intended to be used in the early design phases of complex products with high levels of uncertainty in the product life-cycle. To demonstrate and evaluate the approach, a life-cycle assessment was conducted of two design options for a specific building. In the case study two types of building frameworks were compared from an environmental perspective by calculating the global warming potential, eutrophication potential, acidification potential, stratospheric ozone depletion potential and photochemical oxidants creation potential. In the study, a procedure named the Decision Choices Procedure (DCP) was developed to improve LCA as an effective tool for decision support concerning design alternatives when less information is available. The advantages and drawbacks of the proposed approach are discussed to spur further improvements in the use of LCA as a decision-support tool.

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