building life cycle assessment Articles
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Comparison of different building shells ‐ life cycle assessment
The REACT (Renewable Energy & Efficiency Action) project is an EU‐funded cross‐border cooperative venture featuring the participation of companies and researchers from Burgenland (Austria) and western Slovakia that is developing zero energy concepts for newly built single‐family homes. A variety of building structures are defined for family houses, and the different impacts they have on the ...
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Life Cycle Assessment applications in the building sector
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool has been developed to evaluate environmental impacts of building projects, from construction until demolition. The operation phase is essential, particularly energy processes: therefore LCA is linked to thermal simulation. Several alternatives can be studied. The results, in the form of environmental indicators (e.g., energy and water consumption, contribution ...
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Renovating vs. Building New: The Environmental Merits
This presentation focuses on the environmental implications of two case study projects involving extensive renovation and rehabilitation of older Canadian buildings to serve new functions. Both of the case study projects were submitted as Canadian entries to the Green Building Challenge. One deals with an old locomotive manufacturing and repair facility in Montreal that has been converted ...
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Life Cycle Assessment, Databases and Sustainable Building
Untitled Document We are experiencing a fundamental change that affects how products are developed and, more importantly, how they are perceived, especially by large volume purchasers such as governments and members of extended supply chains. The change affects market shares, and it most certainly affects building material choices and design decisions. I’m referring ...
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Thermodynamic analysis and life cycle assessment of the heating strategies in historical buildings: a case study
This paper presents the thermodynamic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) of the heating strategies in historical buildings. We evaluated two main systems used in historical buildings to provide heat: a central heating system, which is based on a method of heating the whole air volume within the building, and a localised heating system, which is based on a method of supplying the desired ...
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A contextual approach to environmental impact assessment
This paper presents an environmental impact assessment method implemented in a computational tool for the environmental evaluation of building designs. The method is an extension of a traditional material-focused life cycle analysis (LCA), and is based on a spatial allocation for emissions and resource usage. The implementation described here uses a model of an evaluative environment, which ...
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Improving air quality in the office
Most people spend the main part of their day indoors – in the home, school or office environment. Focusing specifically on improving air quality in the office and workplace setting, we are looking at the key potential sources of pollution which impact upon air quality and employees’ health. Examples include, outdoor air (particularly relevant if the workplace is next to a busy road), ...
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Defining the Shale Gas Life Cycle: A framework for identifying and mitigating environmental impacts
Life cycle assessments of shale gas activities differ in their findings. Among the various studies, researchers estimate different greenhouse gas emissions, rates of water use, and rates of wastewater production. Some of the variation in findings is due to the parameters of each study, particularly the life cycle boundary. The life cycle boundary determines which life cycle stages—and ...
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Stocking Your Green Building Toolkit
1. Introduction Designing, constructing and operating environmentally friendly buildings can be a lot more complex than it seems, especially when it comes to materials selection. We would all like simple measures or rules of thumb that would make the selection process easy, but they are hard to come by, if they exist at all. The reality is that we are constantly forced into a balancing act, ...
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