Life Cycle Assessment and the Environmental Certification Systems of Buildings

Abstract

The life cycle assessment (LCA) is an important methodology for the assessment of building components and systems and should be used within the building environmental performance certification systems. The present paper reports on the state of the art of LCA as a tool for the assessment of building components and analyzes its application in the environmental certification systems of building. The analysis of the existing systems for the environmental certification of buildings has revealed that among the four main and most employed systems of environmental certification of buildings currently used, Green Globes is the only one which uses the LCA methodology to evaluate the environmental performance of building components. The other systems use the assessment of building components by the recognition of product attributes, such as cost, durability, renewability and recycled content. The weakness of the attributes approach lies in the fact that these attributes are treated in isolation and lack the whole concept of impact.