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Life Cycle Assessment |
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The green building movement is experiencing a fundamental shift in the way it approaches sustainable design, away from a prescriptive methodology—whereby materials are assumed to have environmental benefits based on recycled content, rapid renewability or other attributes—toward one that emphasizes measurable performance.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a means to this end because it allows the impartial comparison of materials and assemblies, over the course of their entire lives, based on quantifiable indicators of environmental impact such as global warming potential.
Study after study has shown that wood outperforms other materials when considered over its lifetime using LCA. One study, conducted by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM), compared the environmental impacts of homes framed with wood and steel in Minneapolis and homes framed with wood and concrete in Atlanta—the framing types most common to each city. More
Life cycle assessment is the evaluation of materials from cradle-to-grave
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The ATHENA® Impact Estimator for Buildings is capable of modeling 95% of the building stock in North America, including industrial, institutional, office and residential designs, and simulating over 1,000 assembly combinations. The ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies provides instant LCA results—free of charge—for more than 400 common assemblies based on detailed assessments conducted using the Estimator.
Click here to use the EcoCalculator. |
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