Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

This report summarises key findings of Civil 498C Studies in Life Cycle Assessment, as we relate them to the various design processes at UBC. Civil 498C has help to lay the background of what LCA means for the future of green engineering and how it’s integration will help with new projects. This report will showcase how the integration of LCA can improve UBC’s existing environmental action plan. As the audience is UBC Sustainability and Engineering department this report will look at how LCA relates to UBC’s building development directly looking at programs like UBC’s Climate Action Plan, Building Tune-Up Program, The UBC Vancouver Campus Plan and LCA in the Context of LEED. Building development account for a huge part of UBC’s harmful emission which is why it is important for the University to use all the tools at it’s disposal, such as LCA. This report aims to rationalize the use of LCA in UBC building design and operation through the existence of campus sustainability programs. The report will then showcase how the Civl 498C’s class study of UBC buildings can be carried out to minimize environmental impacts. Furthermore, the LCA database produced in Civl 498C is analyzed and the outcomes are discussed. Through the database developed from past years in Civl 498C, a benchmark for buildings at UBC can be established. This benchmark sets a value to which new buildings should be compared against. The results of the benchmarking show that the more concrete a building has, the more likely it will have a high impact. Of the materials, concrete, fiberglass insulation, and polyethylene show the largest impacts per unit of measurement (such as cubic meters or square meters), and it is recommended to try to move away from these materials. Recommended alternatives include wood, and new technologies as they become available. The next steps toward institutionalizing LCA is then discussed. Inaccuracy of LEED is discussed, with emphasis on the lack of absolute values. An idea is proposed for a new database, with local values and more accurate EPDs, working on the fact that the power source for BC is mostly hydropower, and how this will impact different products in a large way. LCA use for whole buildings is paired with LCA of building engineering physics to get a more complete picture. Deriving knowledge from other universities such as Harvard is examined, decoding some of the work that has been done over there. Lastly the use of LCA in other problems, such as waste management, is discussed. This part is left open ended, with the remark that there are countless possibilities to where an LCA study might be done. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

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