Material eco-efficiency indicators for Brazilian buildings

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a set of lifecycle-based indicators to describe material eco-efficiency of buildings normalized per unit of gross floor area (GFA), and at verifying feasibility of their calculation for building materials and components, based upon four case studies. The paper also examines the effects that discrepancies between two carbon footprint accounting methods (embodied CO2 (ECO2) vs embodied CO2e) have on communication of environmental performance of selected materials. Design/methodology/approach – The lifecycle assessments (LCAs) were performed through LCA support platform SimaPro 7.3. Data for materials/components production cycle modeling were collected from primary and secondary data from national literature or adapted from Ecoinvent database. Embodied energy, ECO2, blue water footprint (bWF), non-renewable content and volatile organic compound emissions (VOCe) indicators were calculated from lifecycle inventory (LCI) outputs, while embodied CO2e was calculat...