Paper Conference

Proceedings of BSO Conference 2020: Fifth Conference of IBPSA-England

     

Investigating the effectiveness and robustness of performing the BIM-based cradle-to-cradle LCA at early-design stages: a case study in the UK

Seyma Atik, Teresa Domenech Aparisi, Rokia Raslan

Abstract: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been used to provide a ‘roadmap’ for a building design to mitigate their adverse impacts on the environment. Due to the increasing trend of using Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools in the building design and construction industry, integrated BIM-based LCA approaches have gained importance in early-design stage decision-making processes. However, the ability of these tools to seamlessly integrate into the building design process remains a gap in the field. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by proposing and applying an evaluation framework developed to assess current integration practices within the workflow of an LCA plugin for BIM; eToolLCD. Therefore, an educational building case study in the UK was used to compare assessment results from both conceptual and detailed-design stages produced using eToolLCD to those produced through a ‘traditional’ LCA approach using SimaPro8. The scope in both approaches considered solely the vertical envelope of the building within a cradle-to-cradle system boundary. Findings from the comparison of both tools highlight that the minimum difference was around 8% for the Global Warming Potential impact category while significant variations were detected for other categories. The outcomes of this study are expected to primarily contribute to identifying main opportunities as well as potential technical challenges and limitations of the implementation of the LCA-based plugin and ultimately the proposal of potential future development routes.
Pages: 372 - 379
Paper:
bso2020_Atik