There are many factors that must be considered before evaluating claims that one or another building type or product offers a better environmental return. To understand the full environmental impact of a structure over decades of use, all phases, starting before construction and continuing through demolition, must be considered. Life cycle assessment (LCA) seeks to quantify the environmentalimpacts over the infrastructure life cycle by identifying the costs during each phase.
LCA can be used to obtain credits in certification systems like LEED, but traditional LCA methods can be time, resource, and data-intensive. For complex systems like residential buildings, these demands can lead to delayed assessments with evaluations carried out after important design decisions have already been made, reducing their effectiveness. CSHub researchers have developed a streamlined approach to LCA that requires significantly less time and data, which can reduce expense as well as uncertainty and allow assessments to be conducted earlier in the building design process when decisions can have the greatest impact.
News
- Real Clear Energy: ‘Nutrition Facts’ for Emissions: Why EPA Must Account for the Whole Life Cycle in Low Carbon Labels (October 2024)
- The Hill: EPA must prioritize life-cycle emissions in building materials policy (June 2023)
- MIT News: Concrete’s role in reducing building and pavement emissions (September 2021)
- MIT News: Predicting building emissions across the US (September 2021)
Topic Summaries
- Building Life Cycle Assessment: Quantifying Building Life Cycle Environmental Impacts
- A Primer on Building Environmental Product Declarations and Life Cycle Assessment
- Leveraging streamlined building life cycle assessment and machine learning to determine critical and flexible building design parameters
Research Briefs
- Getting scope 3 right: how building life cycle analysis enables more complete greenhouse gas accounting for materials producers (May 2024)
- Early-Stage Building Lifecycle Optimization of Cost & Carbon Impact (April 2021)
- Mitigation Solutions for GHG Emissions in New Construction (August 2020)
- Affordability of Passive Houses and Zero-Energy Buildings (May 2020)
- Optimizing Building Life Cycle Environmental Impact and Cost (February 2020)
- Meeting Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets in the Buildings Sector (July 2019)
- Concrete Building Design Optimization for Reduced Life-Cycle Impacts (April 2018)
- Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings (February 2016)
- Streamlined Embodied LCA of Residential Buildings (June 2015)
- Streamlining Residential Building Energy Models (January 2015)
- Urban Physics: City Texture Matters (October 2014)
- Streamlined Energy Modeling of Residential Buildings (June 2014)
Whitepapers
Publications
- AzariJafari, H., Guest, G., Kirchain, R., Gregory, J., & Amor, B. (2021). Towards comparable environmental product declarations of construction materials: Insights from a probabilistic comparative LCA approach. Building and Environment, 190, 107542.
- Gregory, J., AzariJafari, H., Vahidi, E., Guo, F., Ulm, F.J., Kirchain, R. “The role of concrete in life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of US buildings and pavements.”PNAS. September 14, 2021 118 (37).
- Gregory, Jeremy, et al. “The role of concrete in life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of US buildings and pavements.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.37 (2021): e2021936118.
- Hester, J., Gregory, J., Kirchain, R. “Actionable insights with less data: guiding early building design decisions with streamlined probabilistic life cycle assessment“The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (2018).
- Hester, J., Gregory, J., Kirchain, R. “Sequential early-design guidance for residential single-family buildings using a probabilistic metamodel of energy consumption.” Energy and Buildings, Volume 134, 1 January 2017, Pages 202-211
- Hester, J., Gregory, J., Ulm, F.J., Kirchain, R. “Building design-space exploration through quasi-optimization of life cycle impacts and costs” Building and Environment, Volume 144, 15 October 2018, Pages 34-44.
- Hossein, A. H., AzariJafari, H., & Khoshnazar, R. (2022). The role of performance metrics in comparative LCA of concrete mixtures incorporating solid wastes: A critical review and guideline proposal. Waste Management, 140, 40-54.
- Keremidis, K., Vartziotis, T., & Ulm, F. J. (2023). Kinetic Temperature of Structures for Resilience, Instability, and Failure Analysis of Building Systems. Journal of Engineering Mechanics, 149(2), 04022110.
- Kirchain, R., Gregory, J., Olivetti, E. “Environmental life-cycle assessment.” Nature Materials, 16 693–697 (2017)
- Manav, Ipek Bensu, et al. “Texture-Informed Approach for Hurricane Loss Estimation: How Discounting Neighborhood Texture Leads to Undervaluing Wind Mitigation.” Natural Hazards Review 23.4 (2022): 05022006.
- Rodrigues, C., Kirchain, R., Freire, F., Gregory, J. “Streamlined environmental and cost life-cycle approach for building thermal retrofits: A case of residential buildings in South European climates” Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 172, 20 January 2018, Pages 2625-2635 (2018).
- Tecchio, P. , Gregory, J. , Olivetti, E. , Ghattas, R. and Kirchain, R. (2019), “Streamlining the Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings by Structured Under‐Specification and Probabilistic Triage” Journal of Industrial Ecology, 23: 268-279.
- Tecchio, P., Gregory, J., Ghattas, R., and Kirchain, R. “Structured Under-Specification of Life Cycle Impact Assessment Data for Building Assemblies” Journal of Industrial Ecology (2018).
- Tecchio, P., Gregory, J., Olivetti, E., Ghattas, R., and Kirchain, R. “Streamlining the Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings by Structured Under-Specification and Probabilistic Triage” Journal of Industrial Ecology (2018).
- Vahidi, E., Kirchain, R., Burek, J., & Gregory, J. (2021). Regional variation of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies for the United States building sector. Applied Energy, 302, 117527.
- Vahidi, E., Kirchain, R., Burek, J., Gregory, J. “Regional variation of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies for the United States building sector.” Applied Energy. Volume 30, 2021.
- Xu, X., Wildnauer, M., Gregory, J., & Kirchain, R. Accounting for Variation in Life Cycle Inventories: The Case of Portland Cement Production in the U.S., R.E. Kirchain et al. (Eds), REWAS 2016: Towards Materials Resource Sustainability, Springer AG.