Evaluation of the environmental impact of buildings, including quality and financial cost

Environmental improvement is necessary for the highly polluting building stock to achieve a more sustainable society. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the well-known tools for the evaluation of environmental impact. Aiming at the environmental improvement of buildings, an attempt has been done to carry out comparative LCA’s, leading to the observation that the definition of the functional unit is problematic. To overcome this problem, a methodology is proposed which integrates a quality evaluation and life-cycle costing (LCC) as two essential parts of the analysis. Moreover the LCA is integrated in the element method to make comparative LCA possible.