Life Cycle Assessment

LCA and the Green Globes™ Rating System

GBI has broken new ground in incorporating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into green building rating systems.

LCA considers materials over the course of their entire lives and takes into account a full range of environmental impact indicators—including embodied energy, solid waste, air and water pollution, and global warming potential.

The current version of the Green Globes™ rating system includes education credits encouraging design teams to use LCA as part of their materials decision making process. But thanks to the new LCA tool commissioned by the Green Building Initiative (GBI), design teams are now able to compare alternate design scenarios and building assembly choices through use of a free, easy-to-navigate software tool.

The new software tool provides LCA results for hundreds of common building assemblies in low- and high-rise categories-including exterior walls, roofs, intermediate floors, interior walls, windows, and columns and beams. It was created through a contract with Morrison Hershfield Consulting Engineers, in association with the University of Minnesota's Center for Sustainable Building Research and the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute. The ATHENA® Impact Estimator for Buildings software was used to generate the results embedded in the tool.

This tool, the ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies, is now available in generic form from the Athena Institute. GBI is also breaking new ground in the development of rating systems by incorporating use of the tool in the newly released GBI Proposed American National Standard 01-2008P, based on the Green Globes™ rating system. The Green Globes™ LCA Credit Calculator, based on the ATHENA® EcoCalculator, is being previewed as part of the public comment period on GBI Proposed ANS 01-2008P. For more information, click on the links below.

ATHENA® EcoCalculator for Assemblies

Green Globes™ LCA Calculator for Building Assemblies