Page 78 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

4.4 LCSA development in two decades of practice: A case study anthology 73
4.4 LCSA development in two decades of practice: A case study anthology

Life cycle sustainability assessment methodologies have been applied in various jurisdic-
tions. LCSA case studies application fall under two broad areas, namely, product develop-
ment or performance assessment (Gbededo et al., 2018). A compendium of LCSA case
studies are described in the following subsections. The summary of the LCSA case studies
is presented in Appendix A.

4.4.1 Demolition processes for end-of-life building

Bozhilova-Kisheva et al. (2012), applied LCSA to assess two different demolition processes
2
on a high-rise end-of-life (EoL) building (17 levels with 6525m gross floor area) in the Neth-
erlands. The scope of demolition was on the complete demolition of the building. The assess-
2
ment was performed on a functional unit of 1m gross floor area. In the demolition process,
three different demolition methods were used for different floors of the 17 level building (see
Table 4.1). But the top-down and high-reach methods were included in the LCSA because
they can replace each other.
While both methods produce recyclable material streams, the quality of the material
stream produced by high-reach method depends on the quality of dismantling. Top-down
method, however, produce quality waste material stream irrespective of the quality of
dismantling.
Due to lack of information for the ELCC and SLCA, the authors excluded background pro-
cesses from the inventory items. In the ELCA, the inventory included materials from demo-
lition (steel, red brick, concrete, and CDW mix), technical equipment, energy consumption,
and waste treatment. The cost categories for the ELCC were selected following UNEP-SETAC
Environmental Life Cycle Costing: A Code of Practice. The inventory items were costs for labor
and equipment, energy, waste disposal, sale of recyclable materials, and 12% overhead.
The SLCA indicators used in this study were selected from UNEP-SETAC guidelines
for SLCA products, based on expert advice from the demolishing company and the company
supervising the demolition operations. Company-specific data are irrelevant in SLCA
decision-making because the processes are performed by the same company. However,
process-specific indicators (hours of work created, and quantity of secondary resources
produced) may produce different values for decision-making.

TABLE 4.1 Demolition methods applied to EoL building.

Demolition method
Demolition method Area of building applied assessed by LCSA
Top-down method Top seven floors Assessed by LCSA
High-reach method Middle five floors Assessed by LCSA
Short-reach method First two floors Not assessed