Life cycle stage
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Life cycle thinking is a crucial part of planning, decision making, and actions to improve the sustainability of construction and building and construction materials. A whole life cycle approach requires consideration of the environmental impact of material choices before the materials are even extracted, and then at each phase of the building lifecycle, from extraction to processing, installation, use and demolition. This means thinking about how the choice of materials affects everything from the functioning of regional ecosystems, to the amount of heating or cooling needed, and how, at the end of their use, these materials can provide a bank of resources to then be re-used. This approach is core to tackling the challenges of reducing whole life carbon emissions of buildings, improving material efficiency and the circularity of processes, making building materials chemically safer, and addressing social hotspots in the material life cycle. Failing to consider the whole life cycle in decision making can lead to unintended trade-offs between environmental, social or economic issues that inhibits progress towards sustainable development. Policymakers play a crucial role to support stakeholders in decarbonizing materials throughout their entire life cycle, from extraction and processing to installation and demolition. Although there are various recommendations for individual stakeholders like manufacturers, architects, owners, and builders to improve the carbon footprints of buildings, these efforts often face challenges due to interdependencies, which means they cannot achieve significant impacts on their own. Instead, stakeholders need simultaneous support to take complementary actions. |
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For instance, designers, owners, and communities may want to use more recycled materials, but they are hindered by the gap between supply and demand. Closing this gap requires cities to introduce and enforce building codes that promote the use of 'circular' material components, enabling the re-use of materials at the end-of-life. Even incremental improvements across different life cycle phases can synergistically contribute to reducing emissions more effectively than focusing on isolated changes.
Yet, to scale up and have a meaningful impact, all these shifts and improvements require coordinated efforts across producers, designers, builders, and communities, considering the entire life cycle of buildings.
The Hub features a range of research papers, guidance on methodology and case studies that demonstrate taking a whole life cycle approach to improving the sustainability of building materials. Additionally, some resources focus more on a particular life cycle stage, such as recommendations for end-of-life actions to improve circularity. These can be accessed by selecting a particular life cycle stage from the menu.
The Hub also supports the approach of the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative. This is a public-private, multi-stakeholder partnership enabling the global use of credible life cycle knowledge by private and public stakeholders, with building materials being a key focus area for promoting best practice in life cycle thinking.
