Template for Evaluating Cradle-to-Site Environmental Life Cycle Impacts of Buildings in India

A massive amount of building construction is expected in economically developing nations such as India over the next few years. The first step in ensuring that the new construction takes place in a sustainable manner is the knowledge about the building's impact on multiple environmental domains. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a promising tool for this, but its application in the Indian construction sector is hampered by a lack of access to detailed inventory data on amounts of all building materials used and the per unit environmental footprints of individual materials (characterization factors). Here, we overcome these limitations by proposing a novel approach that connects the building bill of quantity data with publicly available analysis of rate documents to obtain the detailed material inventory. The approach then combines the material inventory data with the newly available India-specific environmental footprint database of construction materials to calculate the impacts of a building during its different life cycle stages (cradle to site). We demonstrate the new approach through a case study of a residential building within a hospital in North-East India and quantify its environmental footprint on six domains of the environment: energy use, global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, and photochemical oxidant formation potential. Results show that out of 78 materials used, bricks, aluminum sections, steel bars, and cement are the major contributors to the building's total environmental impact. The material manufacturing stage is the hotspot in the building's life cycle. Our approach can act as a template for conducting "cradle-to-site" LCA of buildings for which BOQ data becomes available in India and other countries in the future.