Model for life cycle assessment (LCA) of buildings : EFIResources: resource efficient construction towards sustainable design

The project EFIResources: Resource Efficient Construction towards Sustainable Design, focusses on the development of a performance based approach for sustainable design, enabling to assess resource efficiency of buildings, in the early stages of building design, and supporting European policies related to the efficient use of resources in construction. The proposed approach aims for the harmonization between environmental criteria and structural criteria in the design of buildings and thus, it provides the chance for structural engineers to foster a more efficient use of resources throughout the life cycle of buildings and reduce the environmental impacts of construction works. The work plan of the project is organized into the following main tasks: Task 1: Development of a life cycle model for the assessment of buildings, which will enable the benchmarking; Task 2: Identification of best practices and development of a set of benchmarks for residential and office buildings; Task 3: Development of an approach for sustainable design consistent with the reliability approach of the Eurocodes; Task 4: Recommendations for standardization and guidelines for sustainable design. This report focuses on the development of the model for life cycle analysis (LCA) and on its implementation into a software tool. This model will be used for the benchmarking of the environmental life cycle performance of the structural system of buildings. The model is applied to common construction materials, at the material level, and structural systems, at the building level, to provide additional guidance in its application and to identify main limitations. Therefore, some limitations are identified but these affect mainly other building components rather than the structural system of the building, which is the main focus of the developed model.