A Harmonized Dataset of High-resolution Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment Results in North America

Abstract

Building design practitioners are increasingly using life cycle assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impacts of their buildings. However, industry-generated LCA results are rarely compiled into comparable datasets and rarely made public. Thus, harmonized and open-access datasets of building LCA results are limited, particularly in North America.

Here we present a novel high-resolution dataset of building design characteristics, life cycle inventories, and environmental impact assessment results for 292 building projects in the United States and Canada. The dataset contains harmonized and non-aggregated LCA model results across life cycle stages, building elements, and building materials to enable detailed analysis, comparisons, and data reuse. It includes over 90 building design and LCA features to assess distributions and trends of material use and environmental impacts. Uniquely, the data were crowd-sourced from designers conducting LCAs of real-world building projects.

CECC - Review and Examples

Here are some comments based on our initial review of this document:

  1. The work is thorough and based on sound technical and statistical principles.

  2. The Meta-Data file includes Stages A-C results only.

  3. The Meta-Data file separates biogenic carbon from the A-C results, and labels it as “stored carbon total”.

  4. There is no mention of Stage A5, and no data is given for A5.

  5. The Education building type lumps K-12 with higher education buildings.

  6. One purpose of the CLF Benchmark Study V2 is to establish benchmarks. This data for the 292 building projects provides data for this, but no formal benchmarks were proposed.

  7. Raw data is provided in and excel file have almost a million lines of data. Good information can be extracted from this file, but it is difficult to do manually.

  8. It is our understanding that data for MEP, FF&E, and Site scopes were not solicited for this study.

Representative Graphs From the Study:

Representative box and whisker plots generated from the data by CECC.

Scope definitions:

B = Basement Structure

S = Superstructure

E = Enclosure

C = Interiors - Construction

F = Interiors - Finishes