Supporting the mainstreamed implementation of life cycle assessment

Abstract

With the expansion of the previously energy efficiency-focused funding programs to include a simplified life cycle assessment (LCA) for new buildings, Germany‘s authorities aim to get closer to the ambitious climate goals. In this way, authorities aim to achieve a broadly accepted and suitable implementation of LCA in the planning process through the established group of energy auditors. Still the energy auditors’ workflows were not adequately represented during the development of the simplified LCA procedures. Resulting challenges that arise for this group from their new LCA task are in the focus of this work. The main challenge is how to reduce the effort to gather LCA input data. In addition, methodological improvements based on already for energy assessment gathered detailed information, such as that on technical services, are compared against flat-rate aggregates as applied within the current LCA approach. Finally, the influence of the identified LCA-input data on the LCA-results will be summarized.