Life cycle cost as base to define low cost sustainable building solutions

Life cycle cost (LCC) is an approach that assesses the total cost of an asset over its life cycle including initial capital costs, maintenance costs, operating costs and the asset's residual value at the end of its life. Nowadays, most builders are only concerned with the initial capital costs (land, project and construction costs), working towards their minimization. The same logic can be applied to sustainable building. This leads to an emphasis on the initial cost, in detriment of the other life cycle costs, and, in some cases, to the supporting of solutions that require smaller investment but have higher operational costs (such as the application of less insulation resulting in higher need for heating and cooling energy) and also lower sustainable levels (like higher carbon emissions). In this context, the application of LCC to the sustainable building approach could bring a fresh perspective to the LCC methodology as well as a strong contribution to the economic dimension of sustainable construction. The objective of this paper is to present a review of the main LCC approaches, different application cases to sustainable building and discuss the potential and limitations of this methodology including a case analysis. A selected LCC methodology approach is proposed to be applied in the specific case study Hexa building (a six floor building, with commercial purposes in the ground floor and residential purposes in the other five) developed by the Sustainable team of System LiderA. The case study shall compare the life cycle costs of diverse alternative solutions taking into account several issues such as construction materials, insulation options, glazing area and type, and also other solutions that range from an E to an A and A+ LiderA class. Based on the Hexa building LCC preliminary results, the limitations and potential of this approach will be discussed and other research matters, to be developed in this article and future perspectives to this methodology application, will be pointed out.