Overview
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a structured methodology for compiling and evaluating the environmental impacts and the primary energy demand of a product system throughout its life cycle. This guide supplements BG 52/2013 Life Cycle Assessment - an introduction to explain in more detail how LCA is applied to an entire HVAC building system.
BG 52/2013 provided an overview of LCA, explained the LCA process with reference to the relevant ISO standards, and illustrated the process through a simple worked example. This guide is essentially a more detailed worked example and its aim is to provide a template for applying LCA to the complex systems that are common in building services.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is concerned purely with environmental evaluations. Economic evaluations are carried out as part of Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and this is covered in BG 5/2008 Whole Life Costing. BSRIA runs a training course, Introduction to Economic and Environmental Appraisal which covers both LCC and LCA.
This project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-NMP-2010-Small-5) under grant agreement no. 280393.