• Don’t attempt to perform your own LCA studies unless you want to devote significant resources to making that endeavor a specialty.
• Encourage product manufacturers to perform LCAs on their products and make the results available by asking product reps for LCA data. Refer to ISO-standard Type III Environmental Product Declarations (third-party reviewed LCA results), the work of the Sustainable Products Purchasers Coalition, and/or the BEES software from NIST as mechanisms for making that data available.
• Ask key questions about any LCA data provided to assess its reliability and applicability to your decision. Examples of such questions include:
What are the sources of the data?
How much is based on primary information directly from the operations, as opposed to databases of industry-average data? Of the industry average data, is it regionally specific (U.S. as opposed to Europe) and fully transparent to users or peer reviewers?
What assumptions are included about the functional unit and the service life of the product(s) in question; do these correspond to your situation?
What are the uncertainty factors in the information? No commonly used databases currently include this information, but “uncertainties of 20% or more are likely,” according to Norris. If users ask, there will be pressure to provide an answer.
What is assumed about the products’ maintenance requirements and/or impact on building operations?
Do the impact categories included in the results capture the important information, or might the results by skewed by leaving out key categories?
• Resist the temptation to reduce LCA results to a single score for each product. The weighting required to do this introduces assumptions that may not be appropriate, and too much information is lost. Look instead at the results across all available impact categories and make your own assessment based on those results.
• Whether or not reliable LCA results are available, always apply life-cycle thinking and critically review any product information to support your choices. Resources based on life-cycle thinking include EBN articles and GreenSpec product listings from BuildingGreen, as well as GreenSeal product labeling standards.
• Look at the whole building from a life-cycle perspective and aim to minimize overall environmental impacts while optimizing performance. In general, such an approach suggests that addressing the ongoing impacts of building operation, including energy use, water use, and maintenance impacts should be a higher priority than choosing materials with lower upstream environmental burdens.
