Life Cycle Assessment of an Office Building Based on Site-Specific Data

Peter Ylmén, Diego Peñaloza and Kristina Mjörnell
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Peter Ylmén: RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, 501 15 Borås, Sweden
Diego Peñaloza: IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, 400 14 Gothenburg, Sweden
Kristina Mjörnell: RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, 501 15 Borås, Sweden

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 13, 1-11

Abstract: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an established method to assess the various environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a building. The goal of this project was to calculate the environmental releases for a whole office building and investigate the contribution in terms of environmental impact for different parts of the building, as well as the impact from different stages of the life cycle. The construction process was followed up during production and the contractors provided real-time data on the input required in terms of building products, transport, machinery, energy use, etc. The results are presented for five environmental impact categories and, as expected, materials that constitute the main mass of the building and the energy used during operation contribute the largest share of environmental impact. It is usually difficult to evaluate the environmental impact of the materials in technical installations due to the lack of data. However, in this study, the data were provided by the contractors directly involved in the construction and can, therefore, be considered highly reliable. The results show that materials for installations have a significant environmental impact for four of the environmental impact categories studied, which is a noteworthy finding.

Keywords: life cycle assessment (LCA); building; office; technical installations; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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