| 1. |
- di Bari, R., et al.
(författare)
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Buildings LCA and digitalization: Designers' toolbox based on a survey
- 2022
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 1078:1
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a context of digitalization and increasing quality requirements, the building sector is facing an increasing level of complexity regarding its design process. This results in a growing number of involved actors from different domains, a multitude of tasks to be completed and a higher degree of needed expertise. New buildings are also required to reach higher performances in terms of environmental quality. To that regard, the exploitation of the full potential of digital tools can facilitate the integration of environmental aspects in the planning process, limit productivity shortcomings and reduce environmental impacts, which can result from an unaware decision making. Building environmental assessment can be performed through several Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based tools. “Pure calculation” tools quantify final buildings' environmental potential, while “complex tools” additionally support decision making during the planning process. It is often difficult to choose the best suitable tool, which strongly depends on the user's needs. Within the IEA EBC Annex 72, a survey was realized with the main objective of creating a comprehensive overview of the existing tools dedicated to buildings LCA. The questionnaire included the usability, functionality, compliance, data reliability and interoperability of the analysed tools. Lastly, based on the survey outcomes and their critical assessment, a procedure for the identification and selection of a tool has been proposed based on user's needs. As a result, this work outlines main features of currently available building LCA tools, for which there is a harmonized status in terms of usability and overall applied LCA methodology. Despite the need for more automatized workflows, tools' embedding is mostly not yet applicable in system chains or limited to a restricted number of tools.
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| 2. |
- Habert, Guillaume, et al.
(författare)
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Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions
- 2020
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Ingår i: Buildings and Cities. - : Ubiquity Press, Ltd.. - 2632-6655. ; 1:1, s. 429-452
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Target values for creating carbon budgets for buildings are important for developing climate-neutral building stocks. A lack of clarity currently exists for defining carbon budgets for buildings and what constitutes a unit of assessment—particularly the distinction between production-and consumption-based accounting. These different perspectives on the system and the function that is assessed hinder a clear and commonly agreed definition of ‘carbon budgets’ for building construction and operation. This paper explores the processes for establishing a carbon budget for residential and non-residential buildings. A detailed review of current approaches to budget allocation is presented. The temporal and spatial scales of evaluation are considered as well as the distribution rules for sharing the budget between parties or activities. This analysis highlights the crucial need to define the temporal scale, the roles of buildings as physical artefacts and their economic activities. A framework is proposed to accommodate these different perspectives and spatio-temporal scales towards harmonised and comparable cross-sectoral budget definitions. Policy relevance The potential to develop, implement and monitor greenhouse gas-related policies and strategies for buildings will depend on the provision of clear targets. Based on global limits, a carbon budget can establish system boundaries and scalable targets. An operational framework is presented that clarifies greenhouse gas targets for buildings in the different parts of the world that is adaptable to the context and circumstances of a particular place. A carbon budget can enable national regulators to set feasible and legally binding requirements. This will assist the many different stakeholders responsible for decisions on buildings to coordinate and incorporate their specific responsibility at one specific level or scale of activity to ensure overall compliance. Therefore, determining a task specific carbon budget requires an appropriate management of the global carbon budget to ensure that specific budgets overlap, but that the sum of them is equal to the available global budget without double-counting.
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| 3. |
- Soust-Verdaguer, B., et al.
(författare)
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Implications of using systematic decomposition structures to organize building LCA information: A comparative analysis of national standards and guidelines- IEA EBC ANNEX 72
- 2020
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 588:2
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction: The application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique to a building requires the collection and organization of a large amount of data over its life cycle. The systematic decomposition method can be used to classify building components, elements and materials, overcome specific difficulties that are encountered when attempting to complete the life cycle inventory and increase the reliability and transparency of results. In this paper, which was developed in the context of the research project IEA EBC Annex 72, we demonstrate the implications of taking such approach and describe the results of a comparison among different national standards/guidelines that are used to conduct LCA for building decomposition. Methods: We initially identified the main characteristics of the standards/guidelines used by Annex participant countries. The “be2226” reference office building was used as a reference to apply the different national standards/guidelines related to building decomposition. It served as a basis of comparison, allowing us to identify the implications of using different systems/standards in the LCA practice, in terms of how these differences affect the LCI structures, LCA databases and the methods used to communicate results. We also analyzed the implications of integrating these standards/guidelines into Building Information Modelling (BIM) to support LCA. Results: Twelve national classification systems/ standards/guidelines for the building decomposition were compared. Differences were identified among the levels of decomposition and grouping principles, as well as the consequences of these differences that were related to the LCI organization. In addition, differences were observed among the LCA databases and the structures of the results. Conclusions: The findings of this study summarize and provide an overview of the most relevant aspects of using a standardized building decomposition structure to conduct LCA. Recommendations are formulated on the basis of these findings.
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| 4. |
- Kreiner, Helmuth, et al.
(författare)
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A new systemic approach to improve the sustainability performance of office buildings in the early design stage
- 2015
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Ingår i: Energy and Buildings. - : Elsevier BV. - 0378-7788. ; 109, s. 385-396
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Different users and investors´ project preferences, often lead to trade-offs during the early design phase of a project. Currently, decisions of design options and their technical measures are mainly reduced to an instantaneously assessed criterion (i.e. energy efficiency) within the sustainability assessment of buildings. Due to criteria interdependency, the current linear applied approach used in building certification neglects criteria trade-offs and is therefore only partly suitable for holistic building improvement processes. In order to fulfil stakeholder interests on the one hand and a high sustainability performance on the other, it is crucial to identify appropriate design measures. Based on the Austrian building certification system ÖGNI/DGNB, we applied a systemic approach for building sustainability-improvement, using a case study of a public office building in Graz, Austria. The main part of the study describes the important steps required for the systemic optimization of building sustainability. The method applied in this study allows the quantification of the relative influence and the identification of the individual optimization potential of design options on each single assessment criterion. The proposed systemic approach clearly demonstrated the improvement potential of the currently most developed building certification system considering the interdependency between the individual criteria.
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| 5. |
- Kreiner, Helmuth, et al.
(författare)
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Sustainable building optimization – A systemic approach
- 2014
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the World Sustainable Building Conference 2014.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Objective: During the last two decades various building sustainability certification systems have been developed and established. These assessment systems are considered to be appropriate tools for the evaluation of sustainability performance on buildings. Current building design optimisations mostly focus on single sustainability aspects like environmental quality or economic performance,disregarding a holistic approach. Investors strive to achieve a maximum of the assessment score on the one hand and optimized initial costs on the other. Project stakeholders usually have different points of view regarding project requirements and goals. Sustainable buildings – according to the upcoming CEN/TC 350 standards - should include environmental, social and economic aspects as well as functional and technical issues. In order to achieve a high performance concerning sustainability-assessment due to the choice of the right optimisation measures, early planning stages show the high potential (integral planning).Methods: Based on the Austrian building certification system (ÖGNI/DGNB), we applied a systemic approach for building sustainability-improvement, using a case study of a public office building in Graz, Austria.Results: The main part of our study describes six important steps required for systemic sustainability optimization. The applied method allows the quantification of the relative influence and the individual optimization potential of design options on each single assessment criterion.Conclusion: Building certification combined with a systemic approach regarding the interdependency between single criteria is an appropriate method for the improvement of building sustainability.
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| 6. |
- Malmqvist, Tove, et al.
(författare)
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Design strategies for low embodied energy and greenhouse gases in buildings : analyses of the IEA Annex 57 case studies
- 2014
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the World Sustainable Building Conference, SB14, Barcelona, October 28-30, 2014..
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper introduces the IEA Annex 57 case study method, consisting of a format fordescribing individual case studies and an evaluation matrix covering all case studies. Samplecase studies are used to illustrate the method and the evaluation matrix through a firstpreliminary analysis. In compiling and evaluation existing, transparent case studies we havetaken a stakeholder perspective. By so doing it is intended to identify fordecision makers thekey issues affecting EE/EC in buildings. Analysis in this paper focuses on one of the six casestudy themes, building design strategies for EE/EC mitigation and references cases coveringe.g. material selection, building shape, construction stage strategies and strategies to handlethe trade-off between embodied and operational impacts in net-zero emission building design.
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| 7. |
- Passer, Alexander, et al.
(författare)
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Environmental product declarations entering the building sector: critical reflections based on 5 to 10 years experience in different European countries
- 2015
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Ingår i: International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1614-7502 .- 0948-3349. ; 20:9, s. 1199-1212
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose Growing awareness of the environmental performanceof construction products and buildings brings aboutthe need for a suitable method to assess their environmentalperformance. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become awidely recognised and accepted method to assess the burdensand impacts throughout the life cycle. This LCA-based information may be in the form of environmental product declarations (EPD) or product environmental footprints (PEF), based on reliable and verifiable information. All of these use LCA to quantify and report several environmental impact categorie and may also provide additional information. To better understand on the one hand existing EPD programmes (EN 15804) for each country and on the other the recent developments in terms of EU reference document (e.g. PEF), the authors decided to write this review paper based on the outcomes of the EPD workshop that was held prior to SB13 Graz conference.Methods This paper presents the state of the art in LCA and an overview of the EPD programmes in five European countries(Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland) based on the workshop in the first part and a comprehensive description and comparison of the PEF method and EN 15804 in the second part. In the last part, a general conclusion will wrap up the findings and results will provide a further outlook on future activities.Results and discussion The high number of EPD programmesunderlines the fact that there is obviously a demand for assessments of the environmental performance of construction materials.In the comparison between and experiences of thedifferent countries, it can be seen that more similarities than differences exist. A comparison between PEF and EPD shows differences, e.g. LCIA impact categories and recyclingmethodology. Conclusions Independent of raising awareness of the construction material environmental performance, the existence of somany environmental claims calls for clarification andharmonisation. Additionally, construction materials beingassessed in the voluntary approaches have to follow theharmonised approach following the principles of the EuropeanConstruction Products Regulation (regulated) not to foster barriers of trade. The authors therefore highly appreciate the most recent activities of the sustainability of construction works (CEN/TC 350 committee http://portailgroupe.afnor.fr/public_espacenormalisation/CENTC350/index.html) currently workingon these issues at the EU level. Finally, the LCA community is further encouraged to increase the background life cycleinventory data and life cycle inventory modelling as well as the meaningfulness of certain environmental impact categories, such as toxicity, land use, biodiversity and resource usage.
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