Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OneClickLCA (One Click LCA – transforming the construction industry through automated, affordable and scalable solution for assessing and improving the environmental impacts of construction projects and products)

Teaser

Accounting for 13% of the global GDP, the construction industry is the largest industry in terms of resource usage and waste generation, and buildings are the largest user of energy and driver for global warming. There are a plethora of regulations (developed by either...

Summary

Accounting for 13% of the global GDP, the construction industry is the largest industry in terms of resource usage and waste generation, and buildings are the largest user of energy and driver for global warming. There are a plethora of regulations (developed by either national or local governments) and more than 150 voluntary certification systems aiming to control and limit the environmental impact of construction. Most of these require or promote the use of LCA as a tool to quantify environmental impacts and to identify potential improvements. As great deal of a building’s impacts are caused by materials used in its lifetime, optimisation without LCA is impossible.
Due to the above factors, doing LCAs in construction industry has become more common than ever before. However, the market still has no solutions for fast, affordable and scalable LCA:

The need for special expertise and data collection make LCA work inefficient, costly (at least €3000-15000) and time-consuming (40-150 h, often more).
Economies of scale for LCA are blocked by the diversity of LCA requirements in different regulations and certification systems; in different countries or even inside same country.
Time needed for LCA slows the uptake of green certification schemes and has its costs – if a €50 million construction project is delayed 3 weeks due to a study, the capital costs of the delay reach €200 000 (at 7% interest rate). On the other hand, when LCA study is done in parallel to the design, the study may not be able to influence the design decisions.
Lack of accessible and trusted metrics of environmental performance (LCA) between sellers and buyers has prevented construction industry from adopting more sustainable design, procurement and construction practises and becoming more competitive through more efficient use of resources.

SOLUTION: One Click LCA
Bionova is developing its sustainability metrics software (One Click LCA, www.oneclicklca.com) that provide up to 100-fold time and 10-fold cost savings (compared to status quo) for the end-user conducting a LCA study. In order to fully address the challenges described above and achieve a global scale, Bionova implements business model innovation supporting wide-scale market uptake.

Work performed

WP1 – Industrialisation of the One Click LCA
The work in WP1 aimed at industrialisation of the One Click LCA for serving a very large amount of requests. We managed to facilitate integration by preparing an integration guide and examples which clients can use in their own integrations.

WP2 – Local customisability for the One Click LCA with Application Builder
WP2 aimed at local customisability for the One Click LCA with Application Builder through expanding and testing its functionality with various national schemes and standards. We tested customisation capability in practise with a broad range of target validation schemes. As a result we were able to open access to many national markets.
Additionally we have developed a number of tools which help users to customize and modify reports as they like in their local languages.

WP3 – Market testing and validation
We validated the compliancy with a broad range major LCA schemes and conducted integrated large-scale One Click LCA pilots with world-class companies for validation. For the pilots we have chosen companies from each of our key target sectors, namely construction, construction consulting & engineering, and construction product manufacturing.

WP4 – Communication, exploitation and dissemination
Within the second period we have validated and finalised the value-based pricing model, built value-added reseller network, disseminated the results in different events and by using various means, and raised generally public awareness on sustainability issues and LCA.

Final results

One Click LCA is integrated to the two worlds leading building energy simulation software packages (IES Virtual Environment and DesignBuilder) and to the two of the world’s leading building design software (Autodesk Revit and Graphisoft ArchiCAD).
Users of these software can use One Click LCA for transforming immediately their design data to any voluntary or regulatory Life-Cycle Assessment or Life-Cycle Costing supported by One Click LCA – including nearly all such systems on the planet.
This enables scaling use of LCA to more and more projects, which on its turn enables achieving carbon and life cycle cost savings for projects.
Thus achieved increased familiarity with LCA methodology will lead investors to seek for life-cycle based credentials for their investments, leading to a virtuous circle of increased efficiency.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.oneclicklca.com.