Abstract
The importance of life cycle sustainability in the construction sector is increasing in the light of rising awareness on sustainability issues in society. A means to identify more sustainable options is to assess and compare their sustainability performance. The standards ISO 21931-2 and EN 15643-1 to 5 establish the framework and requirements for sustainability assessment of buildings and civil engineering works. The standards require life cycle assessment (LCA) to be the basis for the environmental part of the sustainability assessment. LCA is a powerful evidence-based method but it requires extensive data. Access to free, easily available and preferably machine-readable LCA data is essential to increase the use of LCA in the construction sector and to make competition fair for all tenderers. This paper aims to compile existing online sources for open-access LCA data of interest for the construction sector. The purpose is to provide a reference document that facilitates the use of LCA in construction. An in-depth search of publications and internet resources was performed, focusing on European sources of Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) and process-based LCA datasets. A comprehensive overview of the European data sources available online and relevant to the construction sector is presented. This research work reveals the existence of numerous sources, often difficult and time-consuming to find. The overview in the paper facilitates finding online data needed for LCA, in many cases in a machine-readable format. This can contribute to increasing the use of LCA in the construction sector, which is important when developing buildings or civil engineering works that are more sustainable over their whole life cycle. A greater use and better integration of LCA in the design process contributes to evidence-based life cycle sustainability of our built environment.
Highlights
Sustainability assessment of buildings and civil engineering works throughout their life cycle is becoming increasingly important, evidenced for example by the recently published standard ISO 21931-2 [1]
A greater use and better integration of life cycle assessment (LCA) and LCA-data from large-scale open-access databases in the structural design process would contribute to comparability of results and evidence-based life cycle sustainability of our built
This study aims to compile the sources of online open-access LCA data and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) available and relevant for the construction sector and to critically review their characteristics, with a focus on European sources
Summary
Sustainability assessment of buildings and civil engineering works throughout their life cycle is becoming increasingly important, evidenced for example by the recently published standard ISO 21931-2 [1]. The standards EN 15643-1 to 5 give the framework and requirements for sustainability assessment of buildings and civil engineering works [2,3,4,5,6]. Increasing use of LCA is important when developing building and civil engineering designs that are sustainable over their lifetime [7, 8]. A greater use and better integration of LCA and LCA-data from large-scale open-access databases in the structural design process would contribute to comparability of results and evidence-based life cycle sustainability of our built
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