Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a LEED certified building

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely used tool to assess the environmental impact of buildings and building products. When results of building life-cycle assessment are in place, there appears an opportunity to make relevant changes in design and construction solutions to optimize energy performance of the building and minimize impacts on environment. LCA tool can be applied in various tasks, and is useful in case of buildings that take part in green building certification programs, such as, for example, LEED® (USA), BREEAM (UK), DGNB (Germany), CASBEE (Japan). The paper describes aspects of conducting LCA for the building obtaining LEED certificate. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) – is an internationally accepted and one of the most popular green building certification programs, that includes a set of rating systems for different types of buildings. LEED focuses on promoting the use of LCA tools and LCA-based decision-making, thus spurring market transformation and improving the quality of databases. There exists a wide range of programs to perform an LCA. For the purposes of the study, the One Click LCA software was used. The result of the study is a comparison of a created model baseline building and the proposed building with the analysis of applied measures of improvement.