An open access online tool for LCA in building’s early design stage in the Latin American context. A screening LCA case study for a bioclimatic building

Abstract

Several Life Cycle Assesmment (LCA) tools have been generated seeking to facilitate its application in buildings. However, most of them are focused on Europe or the US, leaving aside the Latin American region. This paper presents the EVAMED (Building Environmental Assessment tool) framework, a new tool developed mainly for Latin America, aimed at non-LCA expert users. It is analyzed how this software addresses the requirements established in the literature for LCA tools in early design phases. A screening LCA of a bioclimatic project is presented as a case study. A validation has been made by comparing the results obtained with those of a commercial software. The difference between both tools does not exceed an average of 40% considering various environmental impact categories. The results show EVAMED covers several of the requirements established for LCA tools for buildings early design stages, like the use of regional and international databases, the BIM (Building Information Modeling)-LCA integration and its versatility during project configuration and results visualization. Bioclimatic strategies achieve a 30% reduction in the carbon footprint of the case study. The use phase has improved its rating in the Mexican housing carbon footprint benchmark, going from E (78.8 kgCO2e/m2-year) to C (54.7 kgCO2e/m2-year).