Towards the principles of life cycle sustainability assessment: An integrative review for the construction and building industry

Abstract

Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) has been increasingly implemented for the construction and building industry, which has significant impacts on the environment, economy and society. Since LCSA is still at its early stage and the lack of consistent understanding may downgrade the LCSA studies, the Life Cycle Initiative has recently proposed ten principles (10P) for LCSA practices. However, it is not clear whether the proposed principles can represent the state-of-the-art LCSA and guide to the future. This study aims at analyzing the compliance of the existing LCSA studies with the Life Cycle Initiative principles. An integrative review is carried out for 27 available studies for the construction and building industry. The research trend and state-of-the-art practices of the reported studies are reviewed. It is found that the principles of transparency (P8) and completeness (P3) receive the highest average scores, whereas the principles of key stakeholders (P4) and product utility (P5) are the hardest to comply with. As the first attempt to analyze the compliance of case studies with LCSA principles, this study contributes to the harmonization of LCSA practices and the improvement of reliability and communication of LCSA, in particular, for the construction and building industry.