This document presents a whole-building environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) of the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Design Building, an educational building in Amherst, Massachusetts. The LCA was commissioned to publicly declare the environmental performance of the building.
The assessment has been conducted in conformance with the Committee for European Standardization (CEN) standard EN 159781, which stipulates an LCA-based calculation method and reporting requirements for whole-buildings or building parts. While European in scope, EN 15978 provisions are quickly becoming the standard for whole-building LCA worldwide. We therefore applied our North American interpretation of EN 15978 as a suitable methodological choice to meet the purpose of the assessment.
