Using anticipatory life cycle assessment to enable future sustainable construction

Göswein, Verena; Rodrigues, Carla; Silvestre, José Dinis; Freire, Fausto; Habert, Guillaume; König, Jakob

doi:10.1111/jiec.12916

Cited by 39 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Prospective LCA studies that assume future improvements in production or recycling technologies for construction materials might show lower impacts from maintenance and replacement (Alig et al 2020). Conversely, studies that assume a future decarbonized energy mix will show lower impacts from operational energy use and proportionally higher embodied impacts (Göswein et al 2020;Peñaloza et al 2016).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

Influence of methodological choices on maintenance and replacement in building LCA

Francart

Widström

Malmqvist

2021

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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Purpose Previous life cycle assessments (LCAs) of buildings and building components show a broad range of values for the impact of maintenance and replacement, some highlighting these operations as major hotspots while others consider them insignificant. This article highlights methodological aspects explaining this discrepancy. The influence of three aspects is investigated further in a case study of façade materials: the reference study period (RSP), service life data, and the use of a round-up number of operations or annualized impacts. Methods A comparative LCA of seven façade alternatives is carried out as an illustrative case study. For each alternative, global warming potential (GWP) is calculated using three possible RSPs, four possible material service lives (one from industry practitioners and low, standard and high values from a generic database), and two possible calculation methods (round-up or annualized impacts). Results and discussion While the same façade alternative had the lowest GWP in all cases, different methodological choices significantly affected the GWP and respective ranking of other alternatives. Some alternatives showed a significant increase in GWP over longer RSPs, while others were still dominated by the impact of initial production after 200 years. In nearly all cases, generic service life data lead to a higher GWP than data from industry practitioners. Major discrepancies were found between generic and practitioner data in some cases, e.g., for the brick façade. In most cases, annualized impacts led to a slightly lower (or equal) GWP than using a round-up number of operations. However, when a major operation happens shortly before the end of the RSP, the annualized method leads to considerably lower GWP. Conclusions Maintenance and replacement are rarely significant over a 50-year RSP but sometimes become hotspots over longer RSPs. Using round-up operations or annualized impacts does not make much difference in average, but leads to significantly different results in specific cases. As building LCA enters certification and regulation, there is a need to harmonize such methodological choices, as they affect LCA results, hotspot identification, and recommendations. Discrepancies in service life data also call for the gathering of reliable data.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 98%

Influence of methodological choices on maintenance and replacement in building LCA

Francart

Widström

Malmqvist

2021

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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“…This is because they typically provide guidance on modelling and assessing environmental impacts after products have been in commercial use for a sufficient amount of time for data to become available on their performance [ 244 ]. Thus LCA of an emerging technology comes with challenges such as the lack of a clear definition of a future system or the absence of comparability, the presence of uncertainties, and the inability to predict for an upscaled system using the available scarce LCA data [ 243 , 245 , 247 ]. Overcoming these challenges at the early stages of research and development facilitates the reduction of environmental burdens and allows for process optimisation before production on an industrial scale [ 243 , 248 ].…”

Section: Life Cycle Analysis Framework To Assess the Viability Of Green Lithographic Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Nanofabrication Opportunities in the Semiconductor Industry: A Life Cycle Perspective

Mullen

Morris

2021

Nanomaterials

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The turn of the 21st century heralded in the semiconductor age alongside the Anthropocene epoch, characterised by the ever-increasing human impact on the environment. The ecological consequences of semiconductor chip manufacturing are the most predominant within the electronics industry. This is due to current reliance upon large amounts of solvents, acids and gases that have numerous toxicological impacts. Management and assessment of hazardous chemicals is complicated by trade secrets and continual rapid change in the electronic manufacturing process. Of the many subprocesses involved in chip manufacturing, lithographic processes are of particular concern. Current developments in bottom-up lithography, such as directed self-assembly (DSA) of block copolymers (BCPs), are being considered as a next-generation technology for semiconductor chip production. These nanofabrication techniques present a novel opportunity for improving the sustainability of lithography by reducing the number of processing steps, energy and chemical waste products involved. At present, to the extent of our knowledge, there is no published life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluating the environmental impact of new bottom-up lithography versus conventional lithographic techniques. Quantification of this impact is central to verifying whether these new nanofabrication routes can replace conventional deposition techniques in industry as a more environmentally friendly option.

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“…They use the analysis to identify where infrastructure investment is a barrier and the optimized concept that strikes the best compromise between carbon reduction and costs. The fourth paper is titled “Using anticipatory life cycle assessment to enable future sustainable construction” (Göswein et al., ). The authors suggest that classic LCA is not suited for evaluating environmental performance of developing technologies.…”

Section: Assessing Emerging Transportation and Infrastructure Technolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

Bergerson

Cucurachi

Seager

2020

J of Industrial Ecology

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Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development"While the fundamental approach to conducting an LCA of emerging technologies is akin to that of LCA of existing technologies, emerging technologies pose additional challenges. Despite the growing interest in applying LCA at early stages of technology development, there is a lack of systematic guidance for LCA practitioners to evaluate emerging technologies." Current analysis of new technology typically applies economic, environmental, social, and technical performance assessments separately, conducted by individual specialists with little connection between the analyses. For example, engineers often fail to capture the full life cycle (LC) environmental impacts of a technology they are designing, both over its lifetime and with respect to upstream/downstream activities within the supply chain in which the technology will eventually be deployed. The vast majority of life cycle assessments (LCAs) are still conducted on technologies that are much closer to commercialization. This is despite wide recognition that the greatest potential to steer technology toward environmentally preferable outcomes exists at the earliest stages of technology development. The challenge is that this stage also coincides with the least available data, greatest uncertainty, and a paucity of analytic tools for addressing these challenges (Bergerson et al., 2019). While there has been some discussion of methods related to the assessment of emerging technologies, most studies to date are case studies related to specific technology applications, conditions, and regional settings. The spectrum of emerging technologies ranges from products or processes that are innovative and potentially disruptive, to the next generation of commercial products incorporating marginal changes to an incumbent technology (Bergerson et al., 2019). The challenges and opportunities across this spectrum require further discussion within the research community to address questions such as:• When is it useful to conduct an LCA and what questions can it reasonably answer at different stages of development and commercialization?• What aspects of the technology/adoption context need the most careful consideration?• With what other tools or techniques can/should the LCA be coupled?While the fundamental approach to conducting an LCA of emerging technologies is akin to that of LCA of existing technologies, emerging technologies pose additional challenges. Despite the growing interest in applying LCA at early stages of technology development, there is a lack of systematic guidance for LCA practitioners to evaluate emerging technologies. There remains confusion about how LCA can (or should) be used at different stages of technology development and market adoption. The procedures and tools employed to assess emerging technologies still tend to be applied on an ad hoc basis, with no clear guidelines as to what methods are available, applicable, or appropriate. While some authors review and provide recommendation...

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Using anticipatory life cycle assessment to enable future sustainable construction

Cited by 39 publications

References 53 publications

Influence of methodological choices on maintenance and replacement in building LCA

Influence of methodological choices on maintenance and replacement in building LCA

Green Nanofabrication Opportunities in the Semiconductor Industry: A Life Cycle Perspective

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

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