Utilizing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) during building design using Building Information Modelling (BIM) : Case studies from Finland

Abstract

Since the construction industry is turning towards sustainability, several international campaigns have called for creating sustainable roadmaps from global industry different stakeholders including governments and policymakers to achieve a net-zero carbon emission in the building environment sector by 2050. The Ministry of Environment in Finland has responded by defining a roadmap to include the building carbon assessment in the building permit legalizations process during mid-2020 and published a method for calculating the building carbon emission through its whole life cycle. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most widely used Methodology for evaluating the building's environmental performance through its whole life cycle. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a modern trending approach to design and manage the building information between different stakeholders to eliminate conflicts and enhance working performance. As the LCA outcome is highly reliable on the availability of the building elements material information, the integration between BIM and LCA represents a cutting-edge solution for fast and accurate building carbon assessment. The early design phase is the most beneficial timing for conducting the building LCA when the designers could change the high-carbon building elements while avoiding any costly consequences. This research proposes a new approach to conduct the building life cycle assessment (based on the Ministry of Environment in Finland method) by extracting the building elements material information from the IFC building model which follows the common BIM requirements in Finland (COBIM) using Solibri software and calculates the carbon emission using a calculation tool. Three case study buildings from the Skanska construction company are used to give a realistic overview and a tangible understanding of the proposed approach benefits and the current LCA process problems. The case studies' outcome highlights the urgent need for environmental standardization in the building industry. The final part of the thesis conducts a comprehensive analysis between the COBIM and the Ministry method to reach an environmental standardization of the minimum material specifications required in the BIM model which could be used as a foundation for automatizing the LCA process.