Lists
Lists
Din, Asif, Brotas, Luisa and Roaf, Susan (2014) Review of domestic level carbon accounting tools: lessons from a passive house case study. In: The Initiative for Carbon Accounting (ICARB) 2014 conference: Carbon Accounting for Cities and Communities, 5th September 2014, Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of a building evaluated the environmental impact of a range of products on the environment from the time materials are extracted until their eventual disposal. This is a complicated calculation, the role and usefulness nine of the freely available LCA design tools identified in a previous ICARB report on sectoral accounting tools(2013, Menzies et al) were evaluated while completing a full LCA of a single family dwelling in Ebbw Vale Wales built to PassivHaus standards. A full Bill of Quantities (BoQ) for the case study building was compiled using the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Standard Method of Measurement 7th edition (SMM7) and based on this the embodied carbon equivalence of the building was mapped using the Inventory of Construction Energy (ICE) to set a baseline for its cradle to gate carbon impact.
The relative outputs of the nine different tools were benchmarked against this baseline. Some tools proved not to being usable for analysing the carbon impacts buildings at the design stage. A nine hundred percent variation was found between the outputs of some tools while other tools were too specific allowing only the analysis of the limited range of materials or stages in their own databases.
A number of tools were pertinent to North America and some used imperial units which added complications, time and effort to applying them to British construction . Most of the tools were opaque in the assumptions and system boundaries they include. The outputs of the different tools could not be readily used in combination with other tools dealing with different Life Cycle (LC) stages. A comparison of the attributes of the different tools revealed that there are gaps in the LC stages included in the all the available tools purporting to deal with the whole LCA of buildings making a correct comparison of the veracity of the individual tools impossible.
![[thumbnail of Din_Roaf_Brotas_2014_Review of Domestic level Carbon Accounting Tools_Lessons from a Passive House Case_icarb2014.pdf]](https://repository.londonmet.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png "Din_Roaf_Brotas_2014_Review of Domestic level Carbon Accounting Tools_Lessons from a Passive House Case_icarb2014.pdf")
Restricted to Repository staff only
Download (3MB) | Request a copy
 |
View Item |