Accounting for 13% of the global GDP, the construction industry is the largest industry in terms of resource usage and waste generation, and buildings are the largest user of energy and driver for global warming. There are a plethora of regulations (developed by either national or local governments) and more than 150 voluntary certification systems aiming to control and limit the environmental impact of construction. Most of these require or promote the use of LCA as a tool to quantify environmental impacts and to identify potential improvements. As great deal of a building’s impacts are caused by materials used in its lifetime, optimisation without LCA is impossible.
Due to the above factors, doing LCAs in construction industry has become more common than ever before. However, the market still has no solutions for fast, affordable and scalable LCA:
The need for special expertise and data collection make LCA work inefficient, costly (at least €3000-15000) and time-consuming (40-150 h, often more).
Economies of scale for LCA are blocked by the diversity of LCA requirements in different regulations and certification systems; in different countries or even inside same country.
Time needed for LCA slows the uptake of green certification schemes and has its costs – if a €50 million construction project is delayed 3 weeks due to a study, the capital costs of the delay reach €200 000 (at 7% interest rate). On the other hand, when LCA study is done in parallel to the design, the study may not be able to influence the design decisions.
Lack of accessible and trusted metrics of environmental performance (LCA) between sellers and buyers has prevented construction industry from adopting more sustainable design, procurement and construction practises and becoming more competitive through more efficient use of resources.
SOLUTION: One Click LCA
Bionova is developing its sustainability metrics software (One Click LCA, www.oneclicklca.com) that provide up to 100-fold time and 10-fold cost savings (compared to status quo) for the end-user conducting a LCA study. In order to fully address the challenges described above and achieve a global scale, Bionova implements business model innovation supporting wide-scale market uptake.
