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Life cycle assessment and UBC

University of British Columbia. Sustainability Office

This document gives an overview of the discussions regarding how LCA can be incorporated into UBC's Building Design and Operations Guidelines, the findings of a LCA study carried out on UBC buildings and how the information can be used in sustainability programs, and the next steps to institutionalizing LCA at UBC. UBC has numerous actions plans, guidelines and standards which assist consultants in incorporating sustainability to their building design. However, references to LCA are minimal in many of these documents even though it is the only science-based tool to quantitatively support the decision making of building design in terms of its environmental impact and overall sustainability. Recommendations to further incorporate LCA into Climate Action Plan, Vancouver Campus Plan Part 3 Design Guidelines, Technical Guidelines, UBC RFI Evaluation Criteria, and LEED v4 have been made in the report. This will allow LCA to have a bigger presence in UBC building design and operations, resulting in construction of greener, more sustainable infrastructures in the future. Data were compiled in previous years for Civil 498c by completing quantity takeoffs and LCA studies for individual UBC Buildings, which was then used to improve overall sustainability of buildings on campus. However, this year's class objective uses LCA studies done by previous years to observe how current UBC buildings are impacting the environment and how materials and design components will affect impact categories from each building. The results from this year's projects give a good insight on how easily LEED points can be awarded without substantial reduction in environmental impacts. The next step to institutionalize LCA is to consider LCA tools, databases and LCIA methods. Suitable programs are researched in order to find suitable ones such as Athena EIE and TRACI. Decision methods and weighting criteria are also considered to meet UBC's Green Building initiative. Recommendations for institutionalizing LCA in UBC are stated in regards to the success factors such as an entrepreneur who pushes LCA initiatives, the involvement of practitioners and development of a formalized structure. Suggestions to educational and communication initiatives are developed while keeping the success factors in mind. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Text

University of British Columbia. CIVL 498; UBC Social Ecological Economic Development Studies (SEEDS) Student Report

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0108893

Applied Science, Faculty of; Civil Engineering, Department of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/