Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for an apartment project in Nardovegen

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a holistic method that is, nowadays, the most used framework to calculate the potential environmental impact of any type of product, with no limit regarding geographic location, function or time. Many different available software aim to facilitate the assessment of this type of study and, for the specific case of this master thesis, SimaPro has been finally used given that it includes EcoInvent, one of the most complete and updated databases.

The present study assesses the LCA for a set of three buildings included in a new apartment project in Nardovegen, Trondheim. Specifically, it puts special attention on the construction phase of the building, including the production of all materials, their transportation to the construction site and all construction activities. On the other hand, it also contributes in the increase of the available bibliography regarding building LCA, which is not really extensive due to the complexity of the product considered.

First, a literature review has been performed in order to establish the main guidelines when carrying out a building LCA and also a detailed description of the methodology that has been followed is presented, always referencing the corresponding ISO standards. When assessing the analysis for the case of study, all these points have been considered in order to ensure the reliability of the results obtained.

Finally, the overall results show that the total environmental impact regarding the climate change impact category of the system considered is 1.618,9 kg CO2-eq per FU and it is found that the major contributors are the concrete production processes and the energy consumption during the operation phase. Therefore, specific sensitivity and uncertainty analysis are carried out in this sense to finally be able to establish recommendations and possible improvements for future assessments.