Mother Earth News 2000 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

Life Cycle Analysis

Every material that goes into your green house will have an ecological footprint. If you’re building in Michigan with timber from Oregon, how was that wood transported? Is there a local alternative? What’s going to happen to it when you’re finished using it in 75 years? Architects call - this kind of assessment a life cycle analysis, or LCA.

According to Warren Karlenzig, author of A Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing, an LCA inventory will “assess any material from the point of extraction (say, from a forest or mine), through manufacture, distribution use and disposal.” Essentially, LCA determines four basic qualities about each material you use:

* Where and how is the material harvested?

* How was it manufactured or produced

* How will it be used in the building process?

* What will happen to it once it’s finished being used?

Unfortunately, experts can’t agree on a unified method for conducting a LCA. Many say it is too expensive or too time-consuming; plus, the variables in the life cycle of any given material are vast. Nonetheless, the agreed-upon principles behind LCA - which demand that materials be tracked from cradle to grave, so to speak - can serve as a guide to even the small-scale homebuilder.

“Life Cycle Analysis is really a protocol for how to study materials,” says Nadav Malin, editor of Environmental Building News. “But it’s not feasible for an architect or a builder to sit down and start doing a detailed study before deciding what to use when they’re building. Ideally what should be available are [materials data and analyses] that architects or builders can refer to. That’s a large part of what we try to do with Environmental Building News (EBN). That was also the premise behind the Environmental Resource Guide that the American Institute of Architects (AIA) published for a number of years.”

LCA checklists are available from several organizations (see Resources). In addition to EBN and the AIA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the American Society for Testing and Materials are perfecting more comprehensive LCA tests.

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