NDLI: A building sector related procedure to assess the relevance of the usage phase

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Paulsen, Jacob H. Borg, Mathias
Copyright Year	2003
Abstract	Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) are increasingly used in the building sector as a decision-support tool in the design phase of buildings to enable environmentally sound choices of materials and products. The practice in Europe of today regarding product choices is mainly based on cradle to gate LCAs and is quite commonly disregarding the usage phase. The main reason for this is the fragmented structure of the building sector in which the application of specific materials and products is unknown to the manufacturer. The environmental information supplied by the manufacturers to the designers of buildings only relates to the production phase, limited to typical cradle to gate data. A specific material or product choice can however have a considerable impact during the usage phase. Predicting the magnitude of an environmental load originating in the usage phase, as the result of a building product can in some cases be based on information on both product- and building level. To date there are no structured procedures for the inclusion of this information in LCA-studies, even-though it is desirable to include the full product life cycle when including environmental parameters in a product choice.A procedure for assessing the relevance and the possibility to include the usage phase in a structured way is proposed. Considerable effort has also been put into explaining the underlying obstacles of today’s practice in handling the connection between the choice of building products and its resulting impacts in the usage phase.The proposed procedure is primary based on experiences and findings from a comprehensive study on maintenance of floor coverings, together with an inventory of the state of the art regarding LCA in the building sector.The procedure is divided into two steps where the first step is a preliminary estimate of the relevance of the usage phase in a building product comparison. Based on this step, step two can be entered. Step two is a judgement of the possibility to quantify the potential environmental loads that can occur in the usage phase. For step one, four different types of sources of potential environmental loads have been found; emissions from the product to the indoor environment, emissions from the product to the outdoor environment, influence on the resource flow in a building, and finally the demands for maintenance, leading to other recurring loads. For step two, the focus in this article is on maintenance, for which a model structure is proposed as a base for the development of a model to estimate the environmental loads. The three other sources of environmental loads are handled more briefly.The usage phase should to a larger extend be regarded in a product choice situation, when LCA is used as a tool. First, the relevance of including the usage phase should be assessed. Second, the possibility to estimate the environmental loads should be considered. The reason for an exclusion of the usage phase should more clearly be explained, if it is due to lack of relevance or data/models.The proposed procedure shall be regarded as a way to obtain preliminary estimates of the relevance and possibilities to include the usage phase in a product choice situation. Thereby, the handling of the usage phase by the suggested procedure is not a method for estimating the environmental loads but rather a procedure for an inventory of the relevance and possibility to estimate the environmental loads.
Starting Page	142
Ending Page	150
Page Count	9
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09483349
Journal	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Volume Number	8
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	16147502
Language	English
Publisher	Ecomed
Publisher Date	2003-01-01
Publisher Place	Landsberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Building products decision support design phase environment environmental load lca maintenance product choice system levels usage phase Environment Environmental Economics
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science

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