Life-Cycle Assessment and the Environmental Impact of Buildings: A Review

Abstract

Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of various management tools for evaluating environmental concerns. This paper reviews LCA from a buildings perspective. It highlights the need for its use within the building sector, and the importance of LCA as a decision making support tool. It discusses LCA methodologies and applications within the building sector, reviewing some of the life-cycle studies applied to buildings or building materials and component combinations within the last fifteen years in Europe and the United States. It highlights the problems of a lack of an internationally comparable and agreed data inventory and assessment methodology which hinder the application of LCA within the building industry. It identifies key areas for future research as (i) the whole process of construction, (ii) the relative weighting of different environmental impacts and (iii) applications in developing countries

Life cycle environmental performance of material specification: a BIM-enhanced comparative assessment

“…Techniques and approaches adopted in carrying out LCA vary from one study to another. Nevertheless, LCA is generically carried out within the framework of ISO 14040 which consists of four main phases [3].…”

“…The sector has become a major target for environmental improvement as it accounts for more than 40% of total energy consumption and natural resources, with about 33% of global CO2 emission coming from the sector [2] Whilst these alarming figures point out to a need for holistic efforts towards investigating and preventing environmental impacts due to buildings, fortunately, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which involves cradle to grave analysis of products, is arguably the best method of evaluating impacts of a particular product on the environment [3] Nonetheless, despite the claim that clear interaction between buildings' lifecycle stages calls for such global methodology like LCA [4], it has been rather applied to other products, with little application to whole building analysis. This is due to the complex nature of buildings' inventory analysis, inadequate inventory data, its long life span, and so on [3,5] Previous research efforts towards estimating building lifecycle impacts have been dedicated to individual buildings in forms of offices, residential and industrial buildings [6,7,8,9].…”

A Proposition to Extend CityGML and ADE Energy Standards for Exchanging Information for LCA Simulation at Urban Scale

“…In the construction sector, LCA has been used since the 1990s to evaluate construction products and buildings [1]. For few years, LCA has extended to urban scale, and is more and more used to assess urban precincts and building stocks at large scales [2].…”

Lifecycle Energy Consumption Prediction of Residential Buildings by Incorporating Longitudinal Uncertainties

“…Building's annual energy consumption is often derived from a simple average of historical data (for existing buildings) or from simulations (for new buildings) with predefined parameters and boundary conditions. Building's service life, on the other hand, is often predetermined using fixed values such as 50, 75 or 100 years (Fay et al 2000;Khasreen et al 2009). …”