Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Assessment of environmental performance of buildings—Calculation method'
(CEN
2011
) has been developed for the assessment of the environmental perfor-
mance
of
buildings,
based
on
LCA
and
other
quantified
environmental
information.
The standard is applicable to new and existing buildings and refurbishment
projects and provides
• the description of the object of assessment;
• the system boundary that applies at the building level;
• the procedure to be used for the inventory analysis;
• the list of indicators and procedures for the calculations of these indicators;
• the requirements for presentation of the results in reporting and communication;
• the requirements for the data necessary for the calculation.
The approach to the assessment covers all stages, which have been structured in
four main different life cycle stages: product stage, construction stage, use stage and
end of life stage. Inside each building stage, various substages are included, for
example, product stage considers raw material supply, transport to product man-
ufacturing and manufacturing process. In the construction stage, transport of the
product to the building site and construction or installations of the product are
included. The use stage considers issues such as operational energy and water
usage, plus activities related to the actual use, repair and maintenance. The end of
life stage includes deconstruction or demolition processes, transport and waste
processing until final disposal. There is an option for considering the potential
benefits of recycling, reusing or recovering products after their end of life within the
framework structure. Figure
1
describes the building stages in a simplified diagram.
Not directly related to LCA but frequently used for environmental assessment of
buildings, there are a number of voluntary certification methods such as LEED (US
Green Building Council
2013
) or BREEAM (Building Research Establishment
2013
) that consider different environmental aspects of buildings, through a number
of criteria that are weighted to obtain a final building environmental performance
classification. These systems offer a wide perspective of potential environmental
implications of buildings, including besides the evaluation of energy and products,
issues such as water or indoor environmental quality. In relation to the assessment
of building products, it is not directly linked to the quantified environmental impact
or embodied energy, but limited to the consideration of some criteria related to
reuse, recyclability, transport used through the supply chain, or to the fact that
materials are renewable or not. Therefore, these methods do not fully implement an
LCA methodology and their validity to assess the life cycle performance of a
building is limited.
There are also detailed LCA tools such as SIMAPRO (PRé Consultants
2013
)
or GABI (PE International
2013
), which offer the possibility of analysing in detail
the range of environmental aspects of materials and buildings, including embodied
energy. Despite the potential and capabilities of such tools to aid in the design of
