Page 51 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

46 3. Life cycle thinking tools: Life cycle assessment, life cycle costing and social life cycle assessment

3.2 Life cycle costing methodology

The use of life cycle costing (LCC) was reported for the first time in a tractor delivery con-
tract in the 1930s in the United States (Ciroth et al., 2011); it was also used in the US Depart-
ment of Defense in the mid-1960s for the acquisition of high-cost military equipment (Gluch
and Baumann, 2004; Hoogmartens et al., 2014). Some attempts were made in the mid-1980s to
adapt LCC to building investments and several research projects have been developed to
adapt the LCC methodology for the construction industry and for sustainable public procure-
ment, placing LCC in an environmental context (Gluch and Baumann, 2004). Therefore, we
can say that LCC is not a new concept (Heijungs et al., 2013).
The LCC technique is often used to examine the preferable alternative of products and ser-
vices from an economic point of view (Dragos and Neamtu, 2013), to ensure the ranking of
different investment alternatives, and the adoption of the best solution, moving beyond the
purchase price of a good or a service, and using a long-term approach for the decision-making
process (Woodward, 1997). It has also become an important economic tool for decision-
making, as it is used to evaluate the costs associated with an item in its whole life cycle, from
its design through its production, transport to its end of life, and it is often applied in com-
bination with LCA (Di Maria et al., 2018; Buyle et al., 2019).
For instance, Choi (2019) applied LCC and LCA in the case of maintenance and rehabili-
tation of highway pavement; whereas Xue et al. (2019) applied them for urban water system.
Several combined applications exist for the building sector; i.e., Auer et al. (2017) conducted a
case study on the performance of a modernized manufacturing system for glass containers.
Schmidt and Crawford (2017) developed a framework for the integrated optimization of the
life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and cost of building for buildings. Balasbaneh et al. (2018)
analyzed the choice of different hybrid timber structures for low medium cost single-story
residential buildings. Mah et al. (2018) studied the application of LCA and LCC for the man-
agement of concrete waste generated during the construction and demolition stages, and
Hong et al. (2019) for building design.
In addition, several authors combined LCC with LCA and multicriteria decision analysis
methods, among which Miah et al. (2017) proposed a novel hybridized framework combining
integrated methods for LCA and LCC to provide decision-makers a comprehensive method
to investigate environmental and economic aspects. They used a hybrid method combining
the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and analytical
hierarchy process (AHP). Harkouss et al. (2018) applied a multiobjective optimization meth-
odology for net zero energy buildings using multicriteria decision making and LCC; whereas
Invidiata et al. (2018) proposed a method that combines adaptive thermal comfort, climate
change, LCA, LCC, and multicriteria decision making to identify the best design strategies
for improving buildings.
Kouloumpis and Azapagic (2018) presented a new model, which integrates LCA, LCC, and
Social LCA into a fuzzy inference framework; while Rocchi et al. (2018) conducted a sustain-
ability evaluation of retrofitting solutions for rural buildings through LCA and multicriteria
analysis.
The main difference between other traditional investment calculus methods and LCC is
that LCC has an expanded life cycle perspective. The life cycle cost of an item is the sum