III.

Application of LCA

Buildings significantly alter the environment. Building construction consumes 40% of the
raw stone, gravel, and sand used globally each year, and 25% of the raw timber. Buildings
also account for 40% of the energy and 16% of the water used annually worldwide. For
example the raw material can lead to resource depletion. So, how does the LCA or the life
cycle assessment applied in the field of engineering?

Field of Engineering

With the LCA framework, structural engineers would be able to quantify sustainability
concerns and incorporate sustainability as a factor in choosing among alternative designs.
Through LCA, the civil and structural engineers can decide whether it is more sustainable to
rehabilitate and reuse an existing structure or to demolish it and construct a new one.
Furthermore, it can also support the efforts of green building professionals to build more
sustainable buildings. LCA as we all know is a good way to understand the totality of the
environmental impacts and benefits of a product or service. The method enables engineers
and practitioners to see where along the product chain material and energy are most
intensively consumed and waste produced. It allows for comparisons with conventional
products that may be displaced in commerce by new products, and helps to identify economic
and environmental tradeoffs. Lastly, contractors can know how to better prevent or resolve
environmental problems related to project management and improper waste disposal.

a. Home Builders

Home Builders can use a life cycle assessment to explain and affirm how a green building
material yields energy savings during the life of the building. Building Owners can see how
sustainable products favorably reduce environmental impacts during the lifetime of their
investment. LCA identifies environmental hot spots in products and materials and establishes
the benchmark against which improvements can be measured. Companies use LCA to
demonstrate transparency and corporate credibility to stakeholders and customers. LCA is
also used in new product research and development, when environmental footprint is
important to the future marketing or cost structure of a product.

b. To early stage Building Design

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to enable better early stage decision-making by
providing feedback on the environmental impacts of building information modelling (BIM)
design choices. A significant portion of a building’s life-cycle impacts are determined by
decisions made in the early design stages. hoo sing materials with low embodied impacts at
this stagetherefore has potential to significantly reduce a building’s life-cycle impact.
However, evaluation of the environmental performance of these decisions and strategies for
generating alternatives that improve upon the performance of designs are typically not
performed until the design development stage. Life-Cycle Assessment (LC), when applied to
buildings, is a method or predicting how a facility will perform over its lifetime, which
includes raw material extraction, manufacturing, construction, operation, maintenance, repair,
replacement, and demolition. LCA considers environmental and social impacts and is often
coupled with life-cycle cost assessment methods that consider economic impacts. Commonly
applied environmental indi-cators include global warming potential, carcinogenicity, and
resource consumption. LCA is commonly used in such industries as automotive design,
equipment manufacturing, and consumer product design. Compared to products produced in
these industries, buildings are unique, their lifetime is decades long, they have multiple
functions, and they are locally assembled. Adoption of LCA methods to architecture,
engineering and construction (AEC) projects has been imited due to these features.

In order for LCA to be an effective early stage decision-making tool for the AEC industry,
designers must therefore be better enabled to understand which material and dimensioning
decisions most significantly determine a building’s environmental impact and which
decisions are less important. This knowledge can be part of an integrated, BIM-enabled
environmental impact feedback process, with designers focusing on decisions with large
impact during the early design stages and deferring decisions with marginal impact to later
design stages. This paper introduces a framework for providing designers with intuition on
how buildings’embodied impacts are distributed throughout building elements. The
framework is intended for application specifically during the early design stages, when the
design problem is typically not well defined, the number of design alternatives is large, and
the potential to reduce environmental impacts is greatest. The framework utilizes a
computational method that integrates BIM software with LCA and energy analysis software,
in order to quickly evaluate the embodied impacts of thousands of building designs