Life Cycle Assessment in the Built Environment

Abstract

Life cycle assessment enables the identification of a broad range of potential environmental impacts occurring across the entire life of a product, from its design through to its eventual disposal or reuse. The need for life cycle assessment to inform environmental design within the built environment is critical, due to the complex range of materials and processes required to construct and manage our buildings and infrastructure systems.After outlining the framework for life cycle assessment, this book uses a range of case studies to demonstrate the innovative input-output-based hybrid approach for compiling a life cycle inventory. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of a broad ra..