Development of LCAbyg: A National Life Cycle Assessment Tool for Buildings in Denmark

Abstract

In the autumn of 2014, the Danish government presented a national strategy for the building sector. Sustainability was mentioned as one of five focus areas for the future political work within the sector. Subsequently, the development of a national Life Cycle Assessment tool for buildings was initiated, and the first version of LCAbyg was launched in 2015. The primary goal behind the development of LCAbyg has been, with judicious, intuitive and transparent visualization of LCA results, to increase building designer’s awareness of the life cycle impacts of buildings, and to understand where, in the building life cycle, reductions of environmental impacts can be achieved. This paper describes the principles of the LCA tool in terms of the required input data for the building assessment, the calculation methods within the model and how the LCA results are presented to the user. The paper furthermore demonstrates how the tool enables the user to perform comparisons of different construction solutions and material uses, and elaborates on how the predefined visualization of results qualifies the designer to identify hotspots and to understand and mitigate the major impacts throughout the building’s life cycle.