Preface

This book offers a selection of chapters on life cycle assessment, promoting new research results in the field. Authors from the United Kingdom, Panama, Italy, Slovenia, Turkey, and Peru have contributed work examples and case studies from their research in life cycle assessment.

The book covers six topics, determined by the theoretical and practical aspects of life cycle assessment.

Chapter 1, "Life Cycle Assessment in Architecture as Decisional Tool in the Design Stage", focuses on the entire life cycle of buildings in the context of materials, components, energy, and resource consumption.

Chapter 2, "Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings: An End-of-Life Perspective", discusses the problems of building demolition waste and proposes potential appropriate waste strategies to minimize generated waste. The authors developed an assessment framework, which they tested using a case study of a supermarket building. The study shows the impact of processing and transportation of demolished waste materials on carbon emissions and validated that steel waste recycling has the best environmental benefits. The detailed assessment approach in this chapter can be adopted for different realworld projects.

Chapter 3, "Including Nature-Based Success Measurement Criteria in the Life Cycle Assessment", shows how biomimicry principles can improve current life cycle impact assessment tools. The authors conclude that most assessment tools continue to be developed under the "reducing unsustainability" paradigm, where different approaches present great potential for an "achieving sustainability" paradigm. Their research results are validated by two case studies focusing on built environments: net-zero-buildings and sustainable construction projects.

Chapter 4, "Life Cycle Assessment as a Next Level of Transparency in Denim Manufacturing", demonstrates how life cycle assessment can be used to make processes more transparent. The authors present the methodology of building a suitable life cycle assessment model and use the data to compare different products and production practices in the denim industry. The proposed methodological framework makes it possible to calculate the impacts of product developers' and/or designers' choices in denim manufacturing.

Chapter 5, "Pathway toward Sustainable Winter Road Maintenance (Case Study)", discusses the environmental impacts of winter road maintenance using life cycle assessment methodology. The case study shows that an innovative road-weather information system makes it possible to optimize maintenance operations, which can lead to the use of less salt, thus significantly decreasing the environmental impact of winter road maintenance. The proposed approach takes the required processes of winter road

maintenance, the mobility of vehicles passing the road, and their fuel consumption into consideration. The results of the comparative life cycle assessment analysis show that the proposed road-weather information system can lead to a 25% reduction in environmental footprints.

Chapter 6, "The Life Cycle in Startup Valuation", analyzes the life cycle of startups. The author categorizes the startups by type of innovation, focusing on process innovation and disruptive innovation. The lifecycles of the startups are compared in terms of risk, duration, and investment level.

The aim of this book is to help students as well as managers and researchers to understand and appreciate the concept, design, and implementation of life cycle assessment solutions.

The editors thank the chapter authors for their scientific contributions. The chapters were edited and published following a rigorous selection process. We also wish to thank and acknowledge the many individuals who helped us throughout the editorial process that made this book possible.

> **Tamás Bányai and Péter Veres** Institute of Logistics, University of Miskolc, Miskolc, Hungary

> > **1**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

scientific basis.

**1. Introduction**

*Carol Monticelli*

Life Cycle Assessment in

in the Design Stage

thinking, design process, regenerative development

Architecture as Decisional Tool

The horizon of sustainability calls into question extremely complex phenomena, both in terms of social, economic, and cultural transformations, and in terms of the ecological implications of building activity in its wide territorial and temporal extension, and in terms of and the techniques to refer to. On this last aspect, in particular, today it is necessary to counteract the tendency toward an inconsiderate simplification of the aforementioned complex phenomena, because this simplistic approach is precisely the cause of the often trivialized and sometimes radically wrong interpretations. The chapter develops the theme of environmental sustainability precisely in this complex perspective, assuming the consideration of the entire life cycle of building products, whether they are materials, components, or buildings, as an inescapable reference horizon and the measurement of energy and resource consumption and of the impacts that are determined along the life cycle (Life Cycle Assessment—LCA) as the main tool for assessing the concrete sustainability of design choices with rigor and

**Keywords:** life cycle assessment, built environment, architecture, buildings, life cycle

The shift of attention in the design choices derives from the interpretative evolution of the environmental problem and from the new intervention approach: from an *ex post* impact assessment, with the aim of limiting the damage and environmental risks of already existing works and processes, to an *ex ante*, through prevention and research of concepts and strategies aimed at analyzing a building and its parts upstream of the construction process, with the aim of designing an eco-efficient or low environmental impact system. This is a different approach from the practice that has characterized the building industry in recent decades, particularly attentive to a complex and at the same time delicate "environmental system," often exploited to the limit and erroneously considered unalterable: the changes undergone by the ecosystem are known, as a result of human actions, and the visible repercussions caused by these transformations, such as global warming, climate change, soil acidification, water eutrophication, and depletion of the ozone layer. Architecture does not remain
