The Future of LCAs and EPDs: Incorporating Service-Life in the Environmental Impact Assessments of Green Building Materials

摘要

Recent efforts in the development of innovative, "green" building materials and components have primarily focused on reducing the initial embodied energy and carbon of conventional materials (e.g., concrete, plastics). While these efforts are often commended and advocated by sustainable material certification programs and green building rating schema, recent research has shown that reducing the cradle-to-gate impacts of building materials may actually compromise their long-term durability, effectively reducing their ultimate in-service lifetime. This paper highlights research progress on the implementation of a next-generation sustainable materials evaluation framework that reconciles initial reductions in environmental impact (e.g., embodied energy, embodied carbon) and the effects on service life through integrated service-life/lifecycle assessment models for innovative materials. Using "green" concrete as a case-study example, this paper demonstrates that the "sustainability" of a material is spatiotemporally dependent and that end-of-life (functional obsolescence) is an important metric that must be considered in evaluating sustainable material alternatives.