Innovative Building Technologies and Technical Equipment Towards Sustainable Construction: A Comparative LCA and LCC Assessment

Increasingly common building sustainability assessments include more and more the environmental, economic and socio-cultural performance in addition to the functional and technical ones. However, the influence of construction technologies and their technical building equipment as well as the way in which they vary depending on different energetic standards have not been described systematically in literature. For this reason, we evaluated the influence of these aspects and the impact on the environmental and economic performance of residential buildings.
The life cycle performance of 45 variants of a residential building was evaluated by applying the methodology of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) using quantitative assessment indicators proposed by the current European framework (EN 15643). The variants consist of four main construction types (brick, concrete, wood-chip concrete and prefab timber wood construction) in combination with different energetic standards (low to plus energy) and different technical building systems (pellets, heat pump, solar heating and photovoltaic). This led to a model that displays the existing technical variety in Europe.
The comprehensive results show a high optimization potential for the life cycle performance of buildings in general. However, the variation of the technical building equipment and energy standards lead to a higher improvement potential than the use of different construction techniques. Results also indicate that the use of a plus energy standard does not prove to be optimal in all cases.