Exploring the current challenges and emerging approaches in whole building life cycle assessment
Haibo Feng, Rehan Sadiq, Kasun Hewage
Abstract
The environmental impacts of building stock have received significant attention as buildings release one-third of the total greenhouse gas emissions. Whole-building life cycle assessment (WBLCA) has become a trend to address this limitation by ensuring the best environmental performance of a building. However, the current WBLCA development faces many challenges, which makes it difficult to create reliable and comparable results. This study aims to conduct a critical literature review to summarize the current challenges in WBLCA applications and the emerging approaches that might address these challenges. Three main challenges are listed: variances in goal and scope definition, building structure complexity, and varieties in the LCA database and methods. Emerging approaches are also presented to address these challenges, including the integration of building information modeling into WBLCA and environmental product declaration applications in impact assessments. The findings of this study could support researchers and decision-makers with the most popular approaches to conduct WBLCA and achieve reliable outputs.