On the estimation of interior walls in the district-scale Life Cycle Assessment of buildings

Abstract

The large-scale Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of buildings supports decision-making processes in reaching the climate goals of the building sector. Yet, the considerable amount of data required for detailed assessments hinders the method. This is particularly the case for buildings’ interior, which oftentimes surpasses the normative cutoff criteria’s negligibility threshold, and thus has to be considered in building LCA. In light of interior walls’ contribution to buildings’ overall environmental impacts, and a lack of cohesive determination methods thereof, this article proposes a parametric approach to complement an existing district-scale LCA workflow for residential buildings. The approach is applied to an exemplary residential district, using a Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) method, to establish a range of interior wall areas and resulting effects on LCA calculations. Thereafter, the outcome is compared with the results of a preexisting approach and validated project data. The novel method is capable of significantly reducing the tool’s overestimation of interior wall areas from 400% to a value between 7% and 53%. However, it is evident that the area estimation in terms of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) needs to be complemented with a more accurate material setup, which could be differentiated by building archetypes.