Life cycle assessment (LCA) of a LEED-certified green building using two different LCA tools

Download

index.pdf

Date

2019

Author

Aygenç, Merve

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

848
views

1173
downloads

In this study, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool was used for analyzing the environmental effects of the green buildings associated with one of the world-wide used Green Building Rating Systems (GBRS) called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The ultimate goal here is to contribute to the integration of LCA into LEED rating system. The secondary objectives were to execute several LCAs of both a hypothetical conventional building and an actual green building to compare the results of two different LCA softwares as One Click LCA and SimaPro and also to measure the level of sustainability of the actual green building. For the first purpose, LCA study was performed to a selected case study building having LEED v2009 Platinum certification by using two different LCA program called One Click LCA and SimaPro. The system boundary was selected as A1, A2, A3, A4, B4, B5, C3 and C4 according to EN Standards. For the second objective, another LCA was performed in SimaPro for the case study building by taking a hypothetical conventional building as a reference. In this case, system boundary was determined as A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4, B6, B7, C2, C3, C4 and D. In both tasks, functional unit was set as “meter square of the building”. Impact categories of “Global Warming Potential (GWP)”, “Ozone Layer Depletion (OPD)”, “Potential (AP)”, “Eutrophication Potential (EP)”, “Photochemical Ozone Formation Potential (POFP)” and “Abiotic Depletion Potential-Fossil Fuel (ADP-Fossil Fuel)” were considered. CML 2002 method was used in One Click LCA while CML IA Baseline was chosen in SimaPro. For the first objective, the results were only compared based on characterization values since One Click LCA does not give normalized results. Accordingly, results showed that One Click LCA and SimaPro showed highly comparable results in all impact categories except POFP and ADP-Fossil fuel due to the slight difference in system boundaries. In these impact categories, One Click LCA gives 58% and 32% higher results, respectively. For the second objective, environmental effects of the baseline building were found to be significantly higher than the case study building results in all impact categories. In both LCAs, natural gas, steel, concrete and aluminium cladding displayed significant impacts, commonly. However, huge discrepancies occurred in the results due to photovoltaic panels eliminating electricity use during operation together with the aluminium & PVC frame windows and recycling option in the disposal scenarios.

Subject Keywords

Buildings, Buildings Environmental engineering., Life Cycle Assessment, LEED, Green Building, One Click LCA, SimaPro.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12624583/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/44681

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Life cycle assessment of a basic external drywall system in Turkey Akgül, Çağla; Özcelik, Gökçe (null; 2014-10-24) The construction sector, being one of the greatest consumers of raw materials, has been under the spotlight for many years in parallel to the increased environmental awareness. Specifically, building of walls are of critical importance. For each wall element, there are different manufacturing steps; but, in general, the emissions from a wall element are dominated by one or two manufacturing steps. For example, for concrete, both energy use and calcination in cement manufacturing are in focus; for clay brick...
Embodied carbon assessment of residential housing at urban scale Kayaçetin, Nuri Cihan; Tanyer, Ali Murat (2020-01-01) A great majority of the previous research put extensive efforts on the evaluation of life cycle impacts and carbon footprint of single buildings. Analysis on single buildings often excludes components related with urban scale such as construction of infrastructure, distance to city centre and transportation. Research on neighbourhood-scale settlements is necessary to further develop the understanding of the environmental impact of built-environment.
Ionic composition of rainwater on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey Tuncer, Pınar; Tuncel, Süleyman Gürdal; Department of Environmental Engineering (2019) Composition of rainwater is a measure of pollutant deposition to marine and terrestrial ecosystem. Soluble fraction of wet deposited pollutants are even more important because they are bioavailable to fish in the sea and plants on the land. In addition to their harmful effects on plant and animal life, inorganic ions, trace elements and organic compounds in rainwater can also be used as tracers of long-range transport to receptor. In this study, chemical composition of rainwater samples collected at Amasra ...
LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT IN NORTH CYPRUS Erhun, Melis; Akıntuğ, Bertuğ; Ünlü, Kahraman; Sustainable Environment and Energy Systems (2022-2) Integrated solid waste management (ISWM) is used in order to sustain social and environmental quality within a city by using various treatment methods in parallel. On the other hand, in developing countries, solid waste management is one of the biggest challenges in the large cities. The increase in the population, thus the waste generation arises budget deficits for municipalities due to high management costs. The current waste disposal and management method applied in North Cyprus causes pollution to the ...
Assessing the airtightness performance of container-like buildings in relation to its effect on energy efficiency Bekboliev, Mirbek; Tanyer, Ali Murat; Department of Building Science in Architecture (2015) This study analyzes the effect of airtightness on the energy efficiency of single and adjacent containerized buildings, before and after refurbishment. It further gives an overview of air leakage problems found in the sample of prefabricated buildings manufactured and located in Turkey. The air leakage of standard container-like building depends on a number of factors like the age of the building, manufacturing quality and quality of assembly implementation. The airtightness of four typical containerized bu...

Citation Formats

M. Aygenç, “Life cycle assessment (LCA) of a LEED-certified green building using two different LCA tools,” Thesis (M.S.) -- Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences. Environmental Engineering., Middle East Technical University, 2019.