Evaluating the Environmental Impact Score of a Residential Building Using Life Cycle Assessment

1. Introduction

Sustainability for construction projects like buildings mostly involves sustainability of sites and the efficiency in use of water, low energy consumption, use of less building materials, improvement of environment, and innovative design processes (U.S. Green Building Council, 2009). Buildings consume major amount of energy as well as natural resources leading to negative environmental impacts like resource depletion and substantial pollution. About 40% of stone, sand and gravel, 25% of timber, 16% of water and 40% of fossil fuel energies are being consumed by buildings worldwide every year (Arena & Rosa, 2003). As environmental problems are becoming crucial, we need more inclusive building evaluation methods to evaluate building's performance over a large range of parameters encompassing not only environmental impacts but also sustainability. The challenge for building sector, especially in developing countries, is to implement sustainability measures based on objective assessment of the environmental effects of buildings and ensure sustainability. The evaluation methods for most buildings earlier were mostly concerned with only a single parameter such as energy use, comfortable indoor conditions, and indoor air quality (Cooper, 1999; Kohler, 1999). With continuous development, the field of environmental performance assessment of buildings has increased rapidly with number of tools being developed or being used now. However, majority of such tools are voluntary and motivational. Building environment assessment (BEA) has improved after the UK Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) in 1990 was introduced (Crawley and Aho, 1999). BEA tools have been classified by Reijnders and Van Rockel (1999) into two types—criteria-based assessment and life cycle assessment (LCA) based assessment.