Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Energy Analysis of Buildings: A Review

Life cycle assessment is tool to compute environmental impact. This paper review and summarize the literature on life cycle assessment and life cycle energy analysis of buildings. It highlights the need of LCA in buildings, and importance of LCA as a decision-making tool. It shows LCA methodology and discusses various case Studies to find out total life cycle energy, operational energy, and embodied energy and to find total environmental impact due to whole building life cycle, during manufacturing phase, use phase and demolition phase within last twenty years in various part of world. This review shows that generally embodied energy is 10-20% and operational energy is 80-90% of total life cycle energy. Most of the studies are from developed countries, developing countries are not well represented in literature.