Life cycle assessment of green buildings: a literature review

While buildings, including office building, residential building, etc. are vital assets to provide shelters for people to work and live, they also impose significant environmental impact onto the society due to enormous amount of raw materials, energy consumption and various emissions involved during their construction, operations, maintenance and end-of-life demolish. For example, more than one third of the US total CO2 emissions are attributed to the building sector alone, which poses a serious challenge yet also provide a great opportunity for the building industry to be greener. Green building research has been rapidly advanced recently through advanced material technology, innovative construction methods, smart building operations and management strategy, etc. On the other hand, life cycle assessment has been widely accepted as a scientific tool to quantify the environmental impacts for chemicals, consumer products, and service and now increasingly adopted for long-lasting building infrastructures. The longevity of the buildings and complexity of the building systems also raise many challenges and uncertainties in the modeling of their life cycle environment performance. In this paper we would like to conduct a literature review on the impact of various green building technologies on the sustainability performance of buildings based on life cycle assessment technique. Through this literature review, the direction and research needs for potential improvement of these technologies can be found in line with sustainable development.