Tanmay Vasishta, M.S Student and Mohammed S. Hashem M. Mehany, Ph.D., PMP
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO
The concept of construction sustainability has been gaining traction over years now. A large number of tools has been used to assess economic and environmental impacts of the buildings. LCA and LCCA are one of the most widely used tools to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of the buildings over their complete life cycle. The aim of this research is to develop a framework for assessing the economic and environmental impacts of precast and cast-in-place buildings constructed in United States through Open LCA software. The study will include unit processes and material flows from raw material extraction and manufacturing phase to demolition phase of a building (cradle-to-grave) over the life span of 50 years. The developed framework for LCA and LCCA could be applied to all concrete construction projects across the world and could be used as platform for conducting future LCA and LCCA studies as well. Future research could be conducted through probabilistic approach of calculating the annual cost impacts over the complete life cycle of a building.
Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Cost Assessment (LCCA), Precast, Cast-In-Place, Sustainability