Life Cycle Assessment
Services Provided:
- Whole building LCA with the Impact Estimator
- Environmental profiling of structural and envelope systems
- Assessments for new buildings, retrofits or major renovations
- Evaluation of project specifications
- Technical support for the Impact Estimator
- Support for LEED Pilot Credit 1: LCA of Building Assemblies and Materials, using the EcoCalculator
The earth is a closed system with finite resources – to evaluate materials choices, one must delve deeper into the processes behind those materials. 7group has been a leader in the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) to guide resource-efficient solutions in materials specification and building design, and have partnered with the nonprofit Athena Institute to provide LCA services.
Athena Institute, a leader in materials databases and LCA, has been working to provide rigorously developed LCA tools to the building design and construction sphere for the past decade. Improving the sustainability of the built environment by meeting the building community’s need for better information and tools is central to our work with Athena Institute. In addition to providing LCA services, 7group members have been highly involved with the development and data population of Athena Institute’s proprietary LCA tools, the ATHENA® Impact Estimator for Buildings and the ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies.
The Impact Estimator allows design teams to play “what-if” with different building scenarios, comparing environmental impacts to decide on an optimal solution. Assessments are done across all of a building’s life cycle stages, from materials manufacture to construction, maintenance and end-of-life. Final cradle-to-grave evaluations are provided in terms of the following environmental impact measures: primary energy consumption, acidification potential, global warming potential, human health respiratory effects potential, ozone depletion potential, photochemical smog potential, eutrophication potential and weighted resource use.
Approximately 70% of a building’s materials are specified in the conceptual design phase, and it is at this point that a number of crucial opportunities to improve sustainability arise. LCA enables informed decision-making in this design phase, based on a quantitative whole-picture evaluation of the environmental impacts of a building.
An example of an output from the EcoCalculator showing two of the eight modeled environmental impact categories.
An example of an output from the EcoCalculator showing two of the eight modeled environmental impact categories.
