Mason Contractors: Learn About Life-Cycle Assessment

SCS Global Services (SCS) is pleased to announce a one-day, intensive introductory training course in life cycle assessment (LCA). The one-day course will be held in Emeryville, Calif., at SCS’ headquarters on March 5, 2012.

LCA is an assessment tool used to evaluate the environmental and human health impacts of products and services from a cradle-to-grave perspective, taking into account each stage of raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, transportation, use and final disposal. LCA has evolved over four decades, and has been used to guide product design, purchase preferences, and investment decisions. Increasingly, LCA is considered the new paradigm for transparency in environmental labeling, and is being widely adopted for use.

This overview course is suitable to all levels and provides an introduction to LCA principles, a review of the international LCA framework and environmental product declaration standards (ISO 14040, 14044, and 14025), and a summary of the key provisions in a new draft national LCA standard (LEO-SCS-002) being developed under the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) process.

  
The new standard provides a detailed framework for conducting comprehensive life cycle impact assessment that is sufficiently robust to support public declarations, claims and comparisons. It builds upon and complements the basic international LCA framework, providing guidance to support the calculation of results that are complete, accurate, and will stand up to stakeholder scrutiny.

  
SCS programs span a wide cross-section of sectors, recognizing exemplary performance in natural resource management, green building, product manufacturing, food and agriculture, retailing and more. SCS is a Certified B Corp^., reflecting its commitment to socially and environmentally responsible business practice.

MIT Research to Set Life-Cycle Assessment Standard

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has released preliminary research findings that will help set a new standard in life-cycle assessment (LCA) modeling. The studies, which are part of an ongoing research initiative at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, will quantify the cradle-to-grave environmental costs of paving and building materials, and will ultimately result in the most comprehensive LCA model produced to-date.

According to MIT professor and research team leader John Ochsendorf, the expanded life-cycle window – 50 years for paving materials and 75 years for building materials – combined with the level of detailed analysis conducted on the use phase of structures and pavements will distinguish MIT’s latest research. Initial reports have shown the importance of including the use phase, with MIT researchers finding that more than 90 percent of residential building life-cycle carbon emissions and up to 85 percent of highway pavement emissions occur during this period.

MIT’s ongoing work on measuring the life-cycle carbon emissions of these materials is scheduled to be completed by August 2011. The environmental findings will then be supplemented by economic analyses in 2011 to provide the most accurate assessment of the economic and environmental impacts for buildings and pavements yet produced.