Life Cycle Assessments of Circular Economy in the Built Environment—A Scoping Review

Abstract

The Circular Economy (CE) is gaining traction throughout all industries and nations globally. However, despite several attempts, no one-off solutions for assessing the benefits and pitfalls of CE have been established, and neither have any measures with which to determine decisions. In line with this general observation, the Built Environment (BE) is no different. A tendency is observed in which, for the assessment of the environmental impacts of CE, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been deemed suitable. This paper presents a scoping review, using the PRISMA statement extension for scoping reviews, documenting how LCA has been applied for assessment of CE in the BE. The review covers a broad scope of literature, scoping the landscape, and delimits it into publications where CE strategy has been defined explicitly and described as a CE investigation. Among the LCAs applied, the dominant system boundary choice is the attributional approach. The authors open the discussion on whether this is actually suitable for answering the questions posed in the CE paradigm. From the review, and the discussion, the conclusion suggests that there is no dominant procedure in applying LCA of CE in the BE, even despite commonly developed LCA standards for the BE. Few studies also present the consideration to reconsider the applied LCA, as CE puts new questions (and thereby a potentially greater system boundary, as CE may imply greater societal consequences) that do not necessarily fit into the linear LCA framework currently applied in the BE.

From circular strategies to actions: 65 European circular building cases and their decarbonisation potential

“…Current application of LCA assessments in academia and industry varies significantly ( Andersen et al., 2022 ), despite developed LCA standards for the building industry, such as EN15804 and EN15978 ( European Committee for Standardisation, 2011 , 2012 ). For case studies from grey literature, information on assessment methodology was largely absent.…”

“…For case studies from grey literature, information on assessment methodology was largely absent. Inconsistencies in LCA application in the case studies from academic literature (see Appendices A – C for an overview) are common for buildings and building products ( Miller et al., 2016 ; Andersen et al., 2022 ). Inconsistencies stem particularly from the following factors: Different system boundaries were chosen in the studies, especially the included LCA modules, showing results for different parts of a building's or product's life cycle.…”

“…This resulted in a sample of 25 papers. To identify missed articles, snowballing ( Bell et al., 2022 ; Wohlin, 2014 ) was applied by adding papers that the authors were aware of, paper recommendations on Elsevier, and papers included in other reviews of LCAs, CE, or decarbonisation potential in the building industry ( Andersen et al., 2022 ; Gallego-Schmid et al., 2020 ). This snowballing process resulted in the inclusion of eight additional papers.…”

Perspective: Comparison of end-of-life scenarios of municipal solid waste from viewpoint of life cycle assessment

“…In accordance with integrated waste management, the principle of reduction aims to minimize waste production, however, the principle of waste prevention has not become an organic attitude among economic operators (Ghisellini et al, 2016;Geueke et al, 2018). Many research studies (Stahel, 2016;Grosso et al, 2017;Andersen et al, 2022;Avató and Mannheim, 2022) suppose that the CE supports the reduction of the production of various wastes by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The concept of LCA was born in the 1960s, when environmental degradation and narrow access to resources began to cause concern (Bjørn et al, 2018).…”

Including Nature-Based Success Measurement Criteria in the Life Cycle Assessment

“…Specifically, in the built environment, the ALCA is the dominant system boundary selected, following the EN15804 (or EN15978) [19], shaping most policy decisions on buildings regarding environmental and climate aspects [18].…”