An Evaluation of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) Tools for Environmental Impact Analysis of Building End-of-Life Cycle Operations

Building life cycle assessment (LCA) is an important methodology associated with the sustainable construction. The LCA method enables the construction stakeholders to quantify and assess environmental impacts of construction activities, which ultimately helps them make more environmentally friendly decisions. Multiple LCA tools have been developed around the world in order to not only facilitate the application of the LCA method within the industry, but also to incentivize architects, engineers, and contractors to apply this method within their decision-making processes. Many of the existing LCA tools consider the life cycle of a building in five stages, namely - manufacturing, construction, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life. However, these tools lack when it comes to environmental impact analysis at building end-of-life cycle. This study aims to identify how much two well-known LCA tools (SimaPro and Athena IE) - which are currently in use in the industry today - support the building end-of-life cycle operations for making informed decisions. For this purpose, SimaPro and Athena IE are used to simulate the environmental impact assessment of a real world case study with different end-of-life scenarios. The results of this study highlight current deficiencies and benefits of these LCA tools along with a substantial need for a customized LCA-based tool which enables decision makers to make more environmentally friendly informed decisions at the building end-of-life cycle.