Eco-effective sustainability assessment in buildings: Status and future directions for life cycle studies

Abstract

Sustainability assessment is the process of estimating multidimensional impacts (environmental, social, economic) of a product, process, or activity. The concept is more evolved in the context of products and is emerging in the built environment domain. Sustainability assessment in buildings has aligned with the perspective of green buildings, encouraging sensitivity to the local environment and materials with lower energy and carbon footprint. There is an emerging focus on applying circularity principles, life cycle assessment, absolute sustainability, and estimating the long-term impacts of indoor toxic emissions in buildings mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, rising climate change concerns, and novel pollutants such as endocrine-disrupting chemicals and microplastics. This paper presents an overview of the existing literature on building life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) and scrutinizes the existing approaches from an eco-effectiveness perspective. A guiding framework is presented to integrate eco-effectiveness principles in the LCSA of buildings. The framework includes criteria for effectiveness in the context of the life cycle of buildings. This study attempts to integrate diverse perspectives, including limitations in this paper, to promote a holistic understanding of the impacts of a building over its life for improved sustainability. Such studies are crucial in the present context, where the role of the buildings is changing from reducing environmental impacts to ecosystem restoration.