Life Cycle Assessments of Circular Economy in the Built Environment—A Scoping Review

Sarah C. Andersen, Harpa Birgisdottir and Morten Birkved
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Sarah C. Andersen: Buildings & Environment, Danish Technological Institute, Gregersensvej, 2630 Taastrup, Denmark
Harpa Birgisdottir: Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University, A. C. Meyers Vænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen, Denmark
Morten Birkved: SDU Life Cycle Engineering, Department of Green Technology (IGT), University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense, Denmark

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-31

Abstract: The Circular Economy (CE) is gaining traction throughout all industries and nations globally. However, despite several attempts, no one-off solutions for assessing the benefits and pitfalls of CE have been established, and neither have any measures with which to determine decisions. In line with this general observation, the Built Environment (BE) is no different. A tendency is observed in which, for the assessment of the environmental impacts of CE, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been deemed suitable. This paper presents a scoping review, using the PRISMA statement extension for scoping reviews, documenting how LCA has been applied for assessment of CE in the BE. The review covers a broad scope of literature, scoping the landscape, and delimits it into publications where CE strategy has been defined explicitly and described as a CE investigation. Among the LCAs applied, the dominant system boundary choice is the attributional approach. The authors open the discussion on whether this is actually suitable for answering the questions posed in the CE paradigm. From the review, and the discussion, the conclusion suggests that there is no dominant procedure in applying LCA of CE in the BE, even despite commonly developed LCA standards for the BE. Few studies also present the consideration to reconsider the applied LCA, as CE puts new questions (and thereby a potentially greater system boundary, as CE may imply greater societal consequences) that do not necessarily fit into the linear LCA framework currently applied in the BE.

Keywords: circular economy; life cycle assessment; built environment; construction industry; methods and scope; scoping review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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