Life-cycle Assessment or LCA is a scientific methodology used to calculate the environmental impacts, including carbon footprint, of a product, service, or process. It is possible to calculate the LCA of a building to find out how it will affect the environment through its whole existence, from the extraction of raw materials to the construction phase, use, and finally demolition and disposal.
Is a building carbon footprint the same as a building LCA? No, an LCA goes beyond the information contained in a carbon footprint. A carbon footprint measures how much CO2 will be released into the atmosphere by a specific process. An LCA assesses this but also many more impact categories, in order to fully understand the effects on the ecosystem.
Global Warming Potential (or GWP), for example, is one of the impact categories measured in a Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment according to European standards and measures the impact of all greenhouses gases emissions, including but not limited to carbon.
Impact categories help us evaluate the potential environmental impact of different processes and substances. Ozone depletion potential, for example, measures the potential of specific substances to erode the ozone layer. Acidification potential measures the potential of pollutants to cause the acidification of soil and water.
The adoption of LCA by building professionals came as a result of increasing awareness of the environmental impact of buildings and followed a backlash against greenwashing and vague eco-labelling. In short, performing a building LCA is the only reliable way to evaluate the sustainability of a building.
“By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums.”
UN SDG Target 11.1: Safe and affordable housing
The construction sector faces the challenge of enabling people around the world to access better housing, whilst reducing the environmental impact of the necessary new construction.
Materials are a very important part of a building’s impact. By performing a building materials LCA, we are able to assess the environmental impacts of a specific material or product. This often takes the form of Environmental Product Declarations or EPDs and it basically means calculating the LCA of a product, from the extraction of the material through manufacture, use, replace or repair to disposal and recycling.
Building materials already contain embodied impacts when they are purchased and brought to the building site. Their production has caused certain gases to be released into the atmosphere, the transportation of the materials to the manufacturing facilities has caused other impacts, and so on. If an EPD of that material is available, it means that the lifetime impacts of the material have already been calculated and declared, and that makes it easier to calculate the environmental impacts of the building. This is why many countries are pushing towards creating EPD databases of materials produced by local manufacturers.
Beyond reducing environmental impact, there are many business benefits to conducting a building LCA. You can measure the impacts of potential building sites, use it for land sales competitions, contests, refurbishments, or city planning, perform the Life Cycle Assessment of an Infrastructure project, or achieve credits for green building certification schemes like LEED and BREEAM.
Moreover, many certification schemes around the world include Building LCA credits.
Building Life Cycle Costing is the analysis of the costs of your building over its whole life cycle and can help to assess long-term savings and costs. It provides a credit in many green building certification credits and is often calculated alongside a building LCA.
Similarly to building LCA, the earlier in the design process you calculate a building LCC, the more savings you can achieve. In both cases, you can compare design alternatives to find out which is better over the whole life cycle of the building. For example, if you perform LCC calculations you might find out that a product that has a cheaper initial cost might end up being much more expensive in the long run because it will need to be replaced more times during the building use phase, which is usually around 60 years.
LCC provides reliable metrics on costs and savings over the whole lifetime of the building and there is a strong business case for building LCC. When paired with LCA, it can help design buildings that are more sustainable both from an environmental and financial perspective.
To calculate a building LCA you need your project’s bill of materials and the calculated energy performance of your building.
One Click LCA integrates with Building Information Modeling (BIM) Revit, Excel, IFC, IESVE, energy models (gbXML), and other tools, making it easy to import your design.
Using a Building Life Cycle Assessment tool, like One Click LCA, automates the complex LCA calculations. This makes conducting an LCA easier and faster, and more economically feasible to integrate into the early design phase.
When choosing a Building Life Cycle Assessment tool, it is important to identify your needs, evaluate productivity and find out how much you can achieve with that specific tool.
There are two types of Life Cycle Inventory Databases: LCA databases of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), or generic materials, or both. An EPD database enables you to choose a specific material produced by a specific manufacturer and access all the LCA data of that material. While a generic database is based on industry averages, which means that highly performing materials are put in the same basket as materials that emit a lot of CO2. For more transparent and reliable results, an EPD database is advised.
1. LCA used to be costly and time-consuming, requiring weeks and even months to be completed. This has been solved by the development of tools, such as One Click LCA, which can automate the calculations and cut down the time required for an LCA by 85%.
2. The lack of a database can be an obstacle for green building professionals working in countries without their own EPD database. To solve this, a solution can be adjusting results according to local conditions, something that One Click LCA does with a data regionalization methodology developed according to CEN/TR 15941:2010 and verified by BRE.
3. While there is more awareness surrounding the impact of the built environment on climate change, there is a need for stronger incentives and legislative initiatives. While the European Union with Level(s) and countries, like Finland, France, and Norway, are pushing for zero carbon buildings, there is still a lot of work to be done to make the business case for building life cycle assessment even stronger.
We care about LCA because we think all buildings need to be sustainable, and we want to make it easy to understand for everybody. At the same time, Building Life Cycle Assessment is a complex topic that cannot be fully summarized in a list. If this list has piqued your interest, there are a lot of ways you can develop your expertise in Building Life Cycle Assessment.
If you want to get personal advice on how to use One Click LCA to achieve green building certifications and low-carbon design, you can book a meeting with our experts.