commentFEATURE:
The Secret Life of Buildings
Life-cycle assessments gauge the cumulative impact of a building’s materials and its operations—and they could be the future of green-building standards.
... ante for ecological transparency in the real-estate marketplace. Markets work best when buyers and sellers both know the key facts—a condition economists call information symmetry. Some day, whole-building LCAs might create information symmetry by revealing hidden costs to a building’s owners and users.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
But for now, as Jonathan Rose, a green builder and developer, says, “Beyond LEED certification, there’s no consistent way to tell a consumer how green their building really is, so they can make informed decisions—not just about energy costs, but about health. Now that a building’s health costs can be quantified, the bar for a new house smell is no smell at all. The market under emphasizes a building’s impacts on health, which is a stronger market motivator than environmental impacts.”
Ideally, whole-building LCAs would accelerate a virtuous cycle where buyer demand for ecologically superior products spurs competitive innovation by suppliers. Data-driven market demand shifts the decision-making process for the building supply sector. In the view of industrial ecologist Gregory Norris, it provides a concrete incentive for companies to justify the costs of finding ways to improve.
“If we get our environmental benefits to this threshold, then we could increase our market share that much,” Norris suggests. “The more we move to the right on this graph of recycled content, for example, the more sales we’ll get as we meet the threshold requirements for more buyers.”
The Cast Iron Soil Pipe Institute works with Norris to use LCAs of their products to find greater ecological efficiency. They used Earthster, an open-source LCA-driven information system, to let each company benchmark its product against industry averages and analyze the data to get insights into which factors mattered most in their environmental impact.
Obstacles
At present, LCAs are time-consuming, costly, and, some argue, problematic. The main software tool for building-wide evaluations, the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, offers a basic model for environmental ratings, but it only analyzes major structural materials. It does not, for example, include data on finishes or interior surfaces. An even more thorough assessment would also include LCA-level health and social impacts of all materials used.
Beyond that, there needs to be more uniformity in how LCAs are done. In order to compare the impact of floor tile A to floor tile B, for example, the manufacturers of both floor tiles would need to calculate their LCAs in the same way. An LCA system or database would need to be easy to use as well as trans-parent; these are challenges still to be met.
Even those who endorse the vision of whole-building ecological transparency are skeptical we’ll get there anytime soon, given the difficulty of performing a complete LCA for the several thousand products found in a good-sized building. Obtaining the data required from manufacturers who are naturally protective of their proprietary information is a task of formidable complexity.
And yet the upside seems compelling as the marketplace becomes more sophisticated about ecological impacts, and the bar for competitiveness gets raised. In theory, using an ongoing system like Earthster to, say, feed their data into Athena, would let companies alert buyers to the ecological merits of their ongoing innovations. It opens the information channel from suppliers to the architect.
As Jonathan Rose puts it, “My job as a builder is to select the material with the best back story—the least environmental and health costs. Every design and material choice we make carries a market message.”
Rose sees the power of collective action in creating market pressure for suppliers to upgrade materials. “As the green-building movement has grown in size and scale, there has been a tremendous response from manufacturers and suppliers to make more environmentally responsible materials. When you drive key leverage points in an industrial system, the rest will follow.”
|
|
