Building Life Cycle Assessment in Practice
Use this definitive guide to understand life cycle assessments, methods, and tools, then explore guidelines for integration in building design and evaluation. Includes eight case studies.
The definitive guide for life cycle assessments
Tools like energy modeling assist in predicting and reducing energy use in buildings. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the best mechanisms for allowing architects and other building professionals to understand the energy use and other environmental impact associated with all the phases of a building’s life cycle: Procurement, construction, operation, and decommissioning.
The output of an LCA can be thought of as a wide-ranging environmental footprint of a building, including aspects such as energy use, global warming potential, habitat destruction, resource depletion, and toxic emissions.
LCA is one of the most functional building and design assessment devices. This paper provides clear guiding principles, specifically directed toward the architectural profession, in the use of building LCA to help architects understand and use LCA methodology as part of the design process. It identifies scenarios for the use of LCA in the design process and provides a set of proposed guidelines for the conductance of whole-building LCA.
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