Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) Technical Manual and User Guide

Lippiatt, Barbara C.; Kneifel, Joshua D.; Lavappa, Priya D.; Suh, Sangwon; Greig, Anne Landfield

doi:10.6028/nist.tn.1814

Cited by 34 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES), is a tool that gauges the environmental performance of building products using a life cycle analysis (LCA) as specified in the ISO 14040 series of standards (Lippiatt et al 2010). BEES was developed by NIST's Applied Economics Office.…”

Section: Beesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental impact of fire

2016

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Fires are adverse events with tangible costs for property and human life. Quantification of the immediate and direct costs of fire provide a metric for understanding the social and economic impact of fire and for assessing progress in fire prevention and protection. In addition to their physical costs, fires have a range of less immediate and obvious adverse consequences on the natural environment. These include air contamination from the fire plume (whose deposition is likely to subsequently include land and water contamination), contamination from water runoff containing toxic products, and other environmental discharges or releases from burned materials. Current efforts to improve the sustainability of buildings focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the embodied carbon. This overlooks the fact that a fire event could reduce the overall sustainability of a building through the release of pollutants and the subsequent re-build. Several pieces of work exist on the quantification of the environmental impact of fire, but there is a need to pull this information together and to identify the technical gaps that still exist. This publication pulls together the project aims, discusses the sources reviewed, presents a framework that was postulated for quantifying the environmental impact of fire, describes the gaps in knowledge, and presents a plan forward. The research resulted in a more in-depth appreciation of the environmental impact of fire, data, tools and methods that might be undertaken to analysis the environmental impacts as part of a fire engineering analysis, and highlights areas where future research is needed.

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Section: Beesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental impact of fire

2016

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“…Ahlroth and colleagues () describe numerous methods for developing weighting factors, and various sets of published factors by specific panels exist (e.g., Stranddorf et al ; Gloria et al. ; Lippiat ). ISO 14044 recommends using multiple weighting schemes as a sensitivity analysis (ISO ).…”

Section: Methods Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Entity Normalization in Life Cycle Assessment: Hybrid Schemes Applied to a Transportation Agency Case Study

Langfitt

Haselbach

2016

J of Industrial Ecology

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Summary Government agencies, companies, and other entities are using environmental assessments, like life cycle assessment (LCA), as an input to decision‐making processes. Communicating the esoteric results of an LCA to these decision makers can present challenges, and interpretation aids are commonly provided to increase understanding. One such method is normalizing results as a means of providing context for interpreting magnitudes of environmental impacts. Normalization is mostly carried out by relating the environmental impacts of a product (or process) under study to those of another product or a spatial reference area (e.g., the United States). This research is based on the idea that decision makers might also benefit from normalization that considers comparisons to their entity's (agency, company, organization, etc.) total impacts to provide additional meaning and aid in comprehension. Two hybrid normalization schemes have been developed, which include aspects of normalization to both spatially based and entity‐based impacts. These have been named entity‐overlaid and entity‐accentuated normalization, and the schemes allow for performance‐based planning or emphasizing environmental impact types that are most relevant to an entity's operational profile, respectively. A hypothetical case study is presented to demonstrate these schemes, which uses environmental data from a U.S. transportation agency as the basis for entity normalization factors. Results of this case study illustrate how entity‐related references may be developed, and how this additional information may enhance the presentation of LCA results using the hybrid normalization schemes.

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“…Their production requires the baking of virgin clay in an oven at high temperature (of the order of 1000 • C), affecting the environment in two ways: the use of non-renewable materials and the release of a significant amount of greenhouse gases-averaging 0.41 kg of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) per brick [6,7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Physicochemical, Mineralogical and Microscopic Evaluation of Sustainable Bricks Manufactured with Construction Wastes

2017

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Abstract:At an international level, enormous volumes of construction and demolition wastes are generated: 170 million tons/year in the USA, 500 million tons/year in the European Union (EU) and 12 million tons/year in Mexico. Alternative uses for these heterogeneous materials, such as the manufacture of sustainable bricks, are potential solutions to this growing environmental issue. Based on previous studies, and in compliance with Mexican standards, four different types of secondary materials were utilized in the composition of a sustainable brick matrix. Temperature and solar radiation used for drying purposes were determined, as well as weight loss, resistance and initial maximum absorption. In order to characterize the resulting matrix, observations were made with a scanning electron microscope, and the chemical composition of the samples was determined by detecting basic compounds using mapping through SEM-EDS microanalysis, connected to the SEM unit. Finally, thermogravimetric analyses were performed to correlate mechanical and chemical behavior, and resistance to high temperatures of the mixtures. The results obtained showed that all-in-one (AiO) is the most appropriate material for brick manufacturing, Opuntia ficus-indica mucilage improves physical properties, such as increased compressive strength and reduced water absorption, while wood residues, clay minerals and illite enhance mechanical properties.

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Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) Technical Manual and User Guide

Cited by 34 publications

References 20 publications

Environmental impact of fire

Environmental impact of fire

Entity Normalization in Life Cycle Assessment: Hybrid Schemes Applied to a Transportation Agency Case Study

Physicochemical, Mineralogical and Microscopic Evaluation of Sustainable Bricks Manufactured with Construction Wastes

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