Feature from Environmental Building News
March 1, 2002
Sidebar: A Macro-scale Approach to LCA
The standard approach to LCA requires studying each step of the process in detail and building up a life-cycle inventory from those details. An alternative approach, called “Economic Input–Output LCA,” starts from resource flows and emissions for entire sectors of the economy, and assigns the associated burdens to the products of each sector. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a Web-based front-end to their economic input–output model that is available for anyone to use at:
www.eiolca.net. While this macroscopic approach seems very different from the more common, detail-oriented approach to LCA, its practitioners argue that it is consistent with ISO standards.
An economic input–output tool known as “Baseline Green” was developed by Greg Norris together with Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas, and BNIM Architects in Kansas City. This tool examines buildings using U.S. Department of Commerce data mapped to Uniformat II categories from the Construction Specifications Institute. “For every million dollars spent on materials in a generic building, Baseline Green will spit out the specific materials that are responsible for a certain percentage of Toxic Release Inventory emissions, greenhouse gases, and criteria air pollutants,” explains Vittori. The value of these results is limited by data accuracy and by how well the government’s reporting categories can be linked to specific materials or products. Though not a substitute for process-based LCA, economic input–output LCA can point out where the biggest environmental impacts, and therefore the most potential for improvement, can be found.
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IMAGE CREDITS:
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Source: Sylvatica, Inc.
