Special Issue "Life Cycle Thinking and Sustainability Assessment of Buildings"

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable development, climate change and other environmental problems are of high concern, as manifested in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Buildings are highly relevant in this regard as, most of the time, people are inside buildings and a large share of total energy use is connected to buildings’ life cycle.

Wisely used, life cycle thinking can prevent burden shifting between life cycle stages and environmental, social and economic impacts in the different stages of a building’s long cradle-to-grave/cradle-to-cradle life.

Up to now, the focus has rightly been on the use phase as buildings are long-lived products. Hence, the use phase, with its energy use, is often the dominating stage in a building or building elements impact assessment (Baldassarri et al. 2017, Lavagna et al. 2018). However, when buildings are built to near or nearly zero, zero and plus building standards, where energy in the use phase becomes respectively small, around zero or even negative (i.e. buildings that produce surplus energy), the environmental impact of the use phase might not be so dominating anymore (Paleari et al. 2016, Schau et al., forthcoming).

The goal of this Special Issue is to explore how state-of-the-art research and practice in life cycle thinking of the built environment is developing, along with improvements in building construction. Research related to the new construction and renovation of existing buildings, that takes into account a holistic, life cycle approach and several SDGs, is of interest. New construction, whole buildings and building elements, fossil fuel free and zero waste construction, are among the topics for this Special Issue. Case studies, comments, reviews and method papers, not only limited to LCA, but also social LCA and life costing, eventually integrated, or not, into a life cycle sustainability assessment (Finkbeiner, et al. 2010), are welcome.

Literature:

Baldassarri, C., Allacker, K., Reale, F., Castellani, V., & Sala, S. (2017). Consumer Footprint: Basket of Products indicator on Housing. EUR 28765 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg: https://doi.org/10.2760/05316

Finkbeiner, M., Schau, E. M., Lehmann, A., & Traverso, M. (2010). Towards life cycle sustainability assessment. Sustainability, 2(10). https://doi.org/10.3390/su2103309

Lavagna, M., Baldassarri, C., Campioli, A., Giorgi, S., Valle, A. D., Castellani, V., & Sala, S. (2018). Benchmarks for environmental impact of housing in Europe: Definition of archetypes and LCA of the residential building stock. Building and Environment, 145(August), 260–275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2018.09.008

Paleari, M., Lavagna, M., & Campioli, A. (2016). The assessment of the relevance of building components and life phases for the environmental profile of nearly zero-energy buildings: life cycle assessment of a multifamily building in Italy. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 21(12), 1667–1690. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-016-1133-6

Schau EM, Prelovšek Niemelä E, Niemelä AJ, Alencar Gavric TA and Šušteršič I (forthcoming) Life cycle assessment benchmark for wooden buildings in Europe in Kłos Z, Kałkowska J, Kasprzak J (eds): Towards Sustainable Future. Current Challenges and Prospects in the Life Cycle Management - LCM 2019. Dordrecht: Springer

Dr. Erwin M. Schau
Ms. Eva Prelovšek Niemelä
Guest Editors

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• life cycle thinking (LCT)
• buildings
• building elements
• construction
• renovation
• life cycle assessment (LCA)
• social LCA (S-LCA)
• life cycle costing (LCC)
• sustainability assessment