ABSTRACT: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an important methodology for the environment-based evaluation of building materials, components and systems and should be used within the building sustainability certification systems. The present paper reports on the state of the art of LCA as a tool for the assessment of building materials and components and analyzes its application in the sustainability certification systems of building. The analysis of the existing systems for the sustainability certification of buildings has revealed that among the main and most employed certification systems, only a few use the LCA methodology to evaluate the environmental performance of building materials and components. Most of the systems assess building materials and components by the recognition of product attributes, such as cost, durability, renewability and recycled content. The weakness of the attributes approach lies in the fact that these attributes are treated in isolation and lack the holistic concept of impact. In this context, some software tools have been developed to integrate environmental analysis into Building Information Modelling (BIM) platform, in order to facilitate such evaluation during the design process. However, it is still not possible to state whether these tools are actually accessible to the average user, from the point of view of the user interface and the results understanding, and, moreover, how much their results are accurate if compared to a full ad hoc environmental assessment. Such approach is the central point of this paper, which also aims to discuss a theoretical overview of how integration tools of LCA databases into BIM platform would ease the generation of LCA data to be applied at Building Sustainability Certification Systems.
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