Abstract
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly applied to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings. However, current tools for building LCA require detailed information not available in the decisive early design stages. As a result, LCA is usually applied as post-design evaluation and not used to improve the building design. The goal of this paper is to adapt the method of structured under-specified LCA to the Swiss context and implement it in a design-integrated tool. The users of the tool should be able to get a complete estimation of the life cycle impact based on very few inputs, such as building type, intended use and structural system. In addition, the tool should allow to replace these assumptions with more detailed information step by step throughout the design process. The paper describes the development of a structured database and a parametric tool. Furthermore, it exemplifies the intended workflow during the design process on a building design. The presented approach can be scaled up and adapted to the needs of other national contexts in the future. It facilitates environmental performance optimisation of buildings and supports making use of the big potential the building sector has regarding contributing towards climate action (UN SDG 13).
Alexander Hollberg
Associate Professor
Alexander Hollberg is Assistant Professor in the Division of Building Technology, at Chalmers.
Alina Galimshina
Postdoctoral researcher
Alina has joined the research group as a Postdoctoral researcher to work on environmental assessment of building-integrated photovoltaics and robust sustainable design strategies to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Her research areas are life cycle assessment, environmental building design, life cycle cost analysis, uncertainty quantification and global sensitivity analysis.