Integrated building life-cycle assessment model to support South Korea's green building certification system (G-SEED)

In the construction industry, concerted efforts are being made to quantitatively evaluate the environmental impacts of building materials and buildings using the life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. However, the existing building LCA model applies different evaluation systems and standards to building materials and buildings; thus, interlinking and integrating their evaluated values are made difficult. To overcome this problem, this study aims to develop an integrated building LCA model that enables the integration of all LCA results related to building materials used for constructing a building, the building components, and the whole building. First, the building LCA methods and certification criteria employed by major green building certification systems [Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED), Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE), Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREEAM), and Green Standard for Energy and Environmental Design (G-SEED)] were analyzed. Then, an integrated building LCA model that allows integration of the LCA results for building materials into those of the LCA of building components and the whole building was developed. Finally, we established an application plan for a stepwise application of the integrated building LCA model to G-SEED, a Korean green building certification system. The feasibility of the integrated building LCA model was confirmed by comparing it with the existing building LCA model in a case analysis, which demonstrated the applicability of the proposed integrated building LCA method in terms of building materials, building components, and whole building.