This study compares the life cycle environmental impacts of two multilevel residential buildings built in Melbourne, Australia. The study was commissioned by Australand and funded by Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA).
The first building considered, the ‘Study Building’, incorporated an innovative light weight building approach utilising a stick-built timber frame and a ‘cassette floor’ building system. The second building, the ‘Reference Building’ utilised a more typical building approach, incorporating precast concrete panels and suspended concrete slab floors (Table 1).
The primary goal of the study was to compare the potential environmental impacts of the above buildings across their respective life cycles.
The study employed the LCA methodology described by the ISO14044 standard to undertake the comparison of the buildings. The analysis addressed a building life cycle scope which was prescribed by GBCA (GBCA 2014), which in turn based the boundary definition on the EN15978 standard, as shown in Figure 1. Although EN15978 was used to define the scope of the LCA, the study is not intended to be fully compliant with the standard.
