Life-Cycle Assessment

Photo: Duncan Rawlinson. License: CC BY 2.0

Life-cycle assessment, or LCA, is the science of quantifying environmental impacts through the entire process of creating, transporting, using, and disposing of a product or material. Environmental impacts assessed include things like embodied carbon, smog-creation potential, and fossil fuel consumption.  

For building professionals, LCA comes into play in two main ways. To understand the impacts of specific products, look to an environmental product declaration (EPD). To understand the impacts of an entire building, a whole-building LCA is required. Specialized tools are used to perform whole-building LCA.

Life-Cycle Assessment

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  • Life-Cycle Assessment: Tracing a Product's Impacts

    Explainer

    Life-cycle assessment—accounting for all of the environmental impacts of a product from its manufacture to its disposal—is a simple concept, but using it to compare products in practice can be difficult.

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