Life Cycle Assessment As A Tool For Design @ Greenbuild Europe

Catherine De Wolf (Structural Xploration Lab) is co-organizing a workshop session at Greenbuild Europe together with Giulia Peretti, Lisanne Havinga, and Emanuele Naboni as part of the RESTORE initiative.

The session will cover how practitioners can use life cycle assessment in a robust way to inform the design decision making process. Recent innovations are beginning to help lower the operational carbon due to the use phase of buildings: heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and equipment. A lack of knowledge hinders the reduction of embodied carbon due to the rest of their lifecycle: material extraction, transport to sites, construction, maintenance, and demolition. Emerging initiatives pledge to make all new buildings, developments, and major renovations carbon-neutral by 2030 looking mainly at how architects can lower operational energy in buildings. Too often, structural engineers are only involved at later stages of the design, when their decisions can no longer significantly lower the embodied carbon. Because carbon reduction is needed now, a uniform embodied carbon assessment method is needed for both architects and structural engineers. This session will focus on tools available to practitioners to assess and lower emissions of their projects, through environmental-oriented material and construction choices. New information will include an inventory of available data in Europe, an overview of LCA tools, a proposed simplification and standardisation of uncertainty in LCA and a hands-on case study.