Comparison of three LCA methods for buildings
Nguyen, Pham Minh Anh (2023)
2023
Master's Programme in Environmental Engineering
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2023-11-23
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202330091997
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202330091997
Tiivistelmä
The goal of this thesis was to compare the three methodologies commonly used for assessing the environmental impacts of buildings. The studied methods are Finnish Ministry of Environment (Finnish), EU's Level(s), and Product Environmental Footprint (PEF).
Finnish method focuses on cradle-to-grave assessment including both physical and temporal system boundaries to calculate the total carbon footprint emission of a building over the building’s life span. Level(s) provides a framework for comparing building sustainability performance in Eu-rope and providing a set of indicators and minimum construction features. In contrast, the PEF method considers life cycle assessment of building products not on the whole building. Therefore, PEF4Buildings project was referenced to support the application of PEF method for building as-sessment.
A case study was also performed on the demolished Vantaankoski school, and the total area is around 7997 m2. The study aims to calculate the GWP impact category of the building with two supporting software in compliant with the three methods namely OneClickLCA and SimaPro. As-sumptions were made when inventorying data into software due to the data limitation. Finnish method generated the total emission of 18.55 kgCO2eq/m2/year as calculated with CO2data.fi da-tabase in OneClickLCA. The GWP result by Level(s) and Ecoinvent database was 13.53 kgCO2eq/m2/year in OneClickLCA. PEF method with Ecoinvent database provided in SimaPro gave out the result of 29.08 kgCO2eq/m2/year. The results are most likely different with the three methods, but we were able to show the difference such as system boundaries, compatible soft-ware, databases, and impact categories when using them for calculating the same case study data. It is important to note that the Ecoinvent database and EF 3.0 Method provided in SimaPro software are not fully compliant with the PEF method. When using different databases for different methodologies, data harmonization becomes even more critical to ensure consistency and com-parability of results.
Finnish method focuses on cradle-to-grave assessment including both physical and temporal system boundaries to calculate the total carbon footprint emission of a building over the building’s life span. Level(s) provides a framework for comparing building sustainability performance in Eu-rope and providing a set of indicators and minimum construction features. In contrast, the PEF method considers life cycle assessment of building products not on the whole building. Therefore, PEF4Buildings project was referenced to support the application of PEF method for building as-sessment.
A case study was also performed on the demolished Vantaankoski school, and the total area is around 7997 m2. The study aims to calculate the GWP impact category of the building with two supporting software in compliant with the three methods namely OneClickLCA and SimaPro. As-sumptions were made when inventorying data into software due to the data limitation. Finnish method generated the total emission of 18.55 kgCO2eq/m2/year as calculated with CO2data.fi da-tabase in OneClickLCA. The GWP result by Level(s) and Ecoinvent database was 13.53 kgCO2eq/m2/year in OneClickLCA. PEF method with Ecoinvent database provided in SimaPro gave out the result of 29.08 kgCO2eq/m2/year. The results are most likely different with the three methods, but we were able to show the difference such as system boundaries, compatible soft-ware, databases, and impact categories when using them for calculating the same case study data. It is important to note that the Ecoinvent database and EF 3.0 Method provided in SimaPro software are not fully compliant with the PEF method. When using different databases for different methodologies, data harmonization becomes even more critical to ensure consistency and com-parability of results.