Comparing embodied GHG emissions between environmental product declaration and generic data models: Case of the ZEB laboratory in Trondheim, Norway

Loli, Arian; Skaar, Christofer; Bergsdal, Håvard; Reenaas, Marte

doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2023.110583

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Studies such as that of Martínez-Rocamora et al [35] report marked differences between Ecoinvent and GaBi, such as values for the GWP impact of aluminum of 8.54 CO 2 -eq/kg and 0.726-0.891 CO 2 -eq/kg, respectively. Another is that by Loli et al [36], where according to EPD Norge, the carbon footprint for producing 1 kg of reinforcement steel in Norway is 0.3 kgCO 2 -eq., while in Ecoinvent, the production of steel in the European market (RER) has an environmental cost of 2.1-0.3 CO 2 -eq. These are determining factors that vary the scale of the results.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Sectoral Environmental Product Declarations as a Data Source for Life Cycle Assessment

Otero,

Garnica,

Montilla

et al. 2023

Buildings

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The life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology is becoming increasingly prevalent in the quantification of the environmental status in the building sector following new legislative frameworks. Countries need to quantify and assess their environmental impacts as a previous step to regulation and decision-making. In this context, based on a consensus with manufacturers, standardized national data sets are being developed, referred to as sectoral environmental product declarations (EPDs). This study assesses these EPDs with the aim of providing relevant information for global decision-making, focusing on their consistency and shortcomings. An assessment was carried out at both the national level, considering all sectoral EPDs and declared products, and at the international level, with three common building materials (brick, steel, and concrete). The results highlight the lack of traceability in the development and assessment of uncertainty, resulting in substantial discrepancies in reported impacts, especially in the later stages of the life cycle (up to 90% difference). Meanwhile, impacts such as global warming potential or total renewable and non-renewable primary energy use show homogeneous values in the cradle-to-gate stages, with differences generally being under 10%. The analysis of sectoral EPDs should act as a guideline for designing buildings with environmental sustainability criteria, as the last section of this study attempts to highlight.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Sectoral Environmental Product Declarations as a Data Source for Life Cycle Assessment

Otero,

Garnica,

Montilla

et al. 2023

Buildings

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“…In early design, the exact material composition of a building/project is often unclear and likely to change. It can therefore be beneficial to use generic elements from databases to serve as a quick starting point for assessments, rather than specific products and environmental product declarations (EPDs) (Loli et al 2023). Libraries of predefined building data or elements can be utilised to address building information gaps, and the use of benchmarks and target values can assist designers to set performance targets and interpret LCA results (Hollberg et al 2019).…”

Section: Early Design Requirementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating life cycle assessment into the building design process—a review

Prideaux,

Allacker,

H Crawford

et al. 2024

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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The environmental effects associated with buildings are significant, and include considerable contributions towards global greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, and waste generation. Until recently, mitigation efforts have concentrated on improving the operational energy efficiency of buildings, largely ignoring embodied environmental effects. However, focusing solely on increasing energy efficiency can inadvertently cause an rise in embodied effects. It is therefore critical that embodied effects are considered alongside operational effects and are actively integrated into design decisions throughout the building design process. Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to achieve this, however, it is often perceived as difficult to incorporate into design workflows, or requiring specialist knowledge. Additionally, it is not always clear how well aligned LCA approaches are with the building design process. To address this gap, this study aims to provide a detailed analysis of LCA approaches, to assess how well they align with building design stages, and to identify key characteristics, including LCA tools and environmental data used to conduct assessments. A review of academic and grey literature is conducted. Three primary approaches are identified for integrating LCA into the building design process: simplified, detailed and incremental LCA. Simplified LCA uses streamlined data inputs and typically targets a specific design stage. Detailed LCA follows a traditional approach with comprehensive user inputs and results. Incremental LCA progressively evolves the assessment based on design requirements and available building data at each design stage. An analysis of each approach is performed, and key user requirements are mapped against the early design, and detailed design stages. Results reveal that no single approach fully satisfies all design requirements. Findings also highlight a lack of incremental LCA approaches and challenges operationalising these techniques. These approaches often rely on complicated methods or tools not suitable for common design workflows, or they are in early development and require additional verification before implementation.

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“…The remaining eight studies applied uncertainty analysis in the context of whole building LCAs [22,23,26,27,31,48,51,53]. Loli et al [53] estimated and compared uncertainty in embodied GHG emissions of building elements (e.g., superstructure, floor structure, outer walls, inner walls, etc) and materials of a laboratory building in Norway using two approaches: in the first approach, most data were obtained from EPDs, while the second approach only used generic data from the ecoinvent database. MCS was used to investigate selected building elements' contribution to the variability in the GWP results both in the generic mode (MCS function implemented in SimaPro-ecoinvent database) and the EPD-based tool.…”

Section: Monte Carlo Simulation (Mcs)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing uncertainty in building material emissions using scenario-aware Monte Carlo simulation

Bin Thaneya,

Gursel,

Kane

et al. 2024

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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Global greenhouse gas emissions from the built environment remain high, driving innovative approaches to develop and adopt building materials that can mitigate some of those emissions. However, life-cycle assessment (LCA) practices still lack standardized quantitative uncertainty assessment frameworks, which are urgently needed to robustly assess mitigation efforts. Previous works emphasize the importance of accounting for the three types of uncertainties that may exist within any quantitative assessment: parameter, scenario, and model uncertainty. Herein, we develop a quantitative uncertainty assessment framework that distinguishes between different types of uncertainties and suggest how these uncertainties could be handled systematically through a scenario-aware Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS). We demonstrate the framework’s decision-informing power through a case study of two multilevel Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC) manufacturing scenarios. The MCS utilizes a first-principles-based OPC life-cycle inventory, which mitigates some of the model uncertainty that may exist in other empirical-based cement models. Remaining uncertainties are handled by scenario specification or sampling from developed probability distribution functions. We also suggest a standardized method for fitting distributions to parameter data by enumerating through and implementing distributions based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The detailed parameter breakdown allows for developing emission distributions for each process of OPC manufacturing. This detailed approach highlights how individual parameters, along with scenario framing, impacts OPC emissions. Another key takeaway includes relating the uncertainty of each process to its contributions to total OPC emissions, which can guide LCA modelers in allocating data collection and refinement efforts on processes with the highest contribution to cumulative uncertainty. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to provide a standardized framework that can provide robust estimates of building material emissions and be readily integrated within any uncertainty assessment.

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Comparing embodied GHG emissions between environmental product declaration and generic data models: Case of the ZEB laboratory in Trondheim, Norway

Cited by 7 publications

References 18 publications

Analysis of Sectoral Environmental Product Declarations as a Data Source for Life Cycle Assessment

Analysis of Sectoral Environmental Product Declarations as a Data Source for Life Cycle Assessment

Integrating life cycle assessment into the building design process—a review

Assessing uncertainty in building material emissions using scenario-aware Monte Carlo simulation

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