The developed design improvement framework will assist building designers in efficiently improving the WBLCA performance by highlighting the most critical life cycle stages and building assemblies while considering the economic performance. The deliverables of this research will aid in decision making for sustainable urban planning and environmental performances in the building sector. The fuzzy-based multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach was used to compare the comprehensive building-level LCA results, and select the most suitable building design by considering all the environmental and economic impacts at different life cycle stages. Building Information Modelling (BIM) and life cycle cost (LCC) were used to ensure the building assemblies are accurate, and to provide dynamic material updates with associated costs for the design improvement framework. The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) methods were adopted at the building level to ensure the WBLCA is comprehensive and reliable. The main goal of this research is to develop a design improvement framework based on the proposed WBLCA method to evaluate and improve the environmental and economic performance at the building level. There is no study that provides a building design improvement method based on the final LCA results.
Furthermore, the current WBLCA studies usually end after the LCA results are calculated and interpreted. On the other hand, there are very few studies that consider environmental and economic impacts simultaneously at the building level. However, research studies usually face challenges to systematically evaluating WBLCA performance at the design stage due to the complexity of assessments at the building level.
In an attempt to address this limitation, whole-building life cycle assessment (WBLCA) has become a trend in order to ensure the best environmental performance of a building in holistic terms. In the past, most efforts were focused on mitigating environmental impacts during the operational stage of buildings, while the environmental performance of the other life cycle stages received limited attention.
#USING OPENLCA FOR BUILDING SOFTWARE#
We also offer to implement smaller features to make sure you get exactly the software you need.The environmental impacts of building stock have received significant attention in recent years, as buildings consume more than 40% of the world’s energy and release one third of total greenhouse gas emissions. In several cases openLCA was used as a basis to build a customized software solution, with web or desktop applications.
#USING OPENLCA FOR BUILDING PROFESSIONAL#
A “ Guided Case Study” including a training is the perfect start to using openLCA in a professional environment. The report feature of openLCA where a complete html report is created is particularly interesting for publishing and sharing results.įor businesses who have been working with other LCA software, we are helping migrate existing models to openLCA and assure a seamless transition. OpenLCA is easy to install, offers a modern and intuitive user interface and can be used for working in a team. Many business users rely on the known and world-wide used LCA databases such as GaBi or ecoinvent which can be used in openLCA. Keywords: Green roof impact climate change Life-Cycle Assessment OpenLCA.
In addition, use of natural fertilizer for amending the growth substrate and water from well for watering the green roof, is also recommended. Creating LCA studies according to international standards, be it for sustainability reporting, marketing of your products or product design, becomes more and more an inherent part of businesses. openLCA allows fast calculation of results with the largest set of data available for LCA. to reduce the use of cement, gravel, virgin plastics, and soil as well as imported materials whose transport is done by plane.