LCA study of Hennings
Creators: name: Biczok, Alex
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2015

description: This report contains the results of a life-cycle assessment (LCA) performed on the Hennings Building on the University of British Columbia's Vancouver Campus. This report was constructed as part of the University of British Columbia (UBC) CIVL 498 class, under the supervision the the course instructor, Rob Sianchuk, in the Fall 2013 semester. Approximately 20 other students took part in the class, each examining a different UBC building in the context of an LCA. UBC is a hundred-year old institution, and the engineering and architectural practices involved in creating its infrastructure have naturally evolved over time. One of the main goals of this project was to compare the different campus buildings with regards to their environmental impact, and in so doing provide more context for future construction projects. The results of this project will provide clear insight into which construction practices result in the lowest environmental impact, and this context can easily inform university policy. A number of tools and methods are available for performing an LCA. This study relied upon the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute's Impact Estimator. This software is a publicly available tool that correlates the materials used in construction to their environmental impacts. The Impact Estimator uses data from TRACI, a database which is managed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. The impact estimator is a useful tool as it can take individual components of the building as inputs, then compile them and output a series of environmental impacts. The other tool used in this analysis was On-Screen Takeoff, which is able to quantify individual building elements and provide dimensions that can be input into the Athena Impact Estimator. The purpose of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is to quantify the material and energy inputs into a product or product system, and then correlate those inputs to their overall environmental impact. LCA will typically account for the creation, use and disposal of a product or service, including the acquisition of of raw materials used. This differs from more traditional life-cycle costing, in that it is not primarily concerned with a financial assessment; it's goal is to promote sustainable business decisions by providing reliable data. The results of this LCA show that, were the Hennings building to be constructed today, it would have a quite significant environmental impact. The building was constructed almost entirely with concrete, a carbon-intensive material that requires significant energy to extract, transport and use in construction. The results of this LCA show that the environmental footprint of Hennings is much greater than most UBC buildings. Architectural practices have greatly improved since Hennings was created, but it is still useful to examine it as a lesson in how unsustainable certain practices are. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”