1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910706911603321

Autore

Gu Hongmei

Titolo

Life cycle assessment and environmental building declaration for the design building at the University of Massachusetts / / Hongmei Gu, Richard Bergman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Madison, WI : , : United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, , February 2018

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (71 pages) : color illustrations

Collana

General technical report ; ; FPL-GTR-255

Soggetti

Forest products - Environmental aspects - Massachusetts - Amherst

Building, Wooden - Environmental aspects - Massachusetts - Amherst

Life cycle costing - Massachusetts - Amherst

Product life cycle - Massachusetts - Amherst

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System

Buildings - Massachusetts - Amherst

Technical reports.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

"February 2018."

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Sommario/riassunto

With the world's increasing focus on sustainability in the construction sector through green building systems, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been actively engaged in green building advocacy in the United States through USDA Tall Wood Building competitions and follow-up research on use of mass timber for nonresidential buildings. The USDA Forest Service, Forest Product Laboratory (FPL) funded the study of environmental performance of the pioneer mass timber building (the John W. Olver Design Building) built at University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2016. The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute conducted the whole building life cycle assessment (LCA) using the Impact Estimator for Building software. Secondly, the reported LCA results led to development of an environmental building declaration (EBD) in conformance with European



standard EN 15978. Environmental building declarations summarize the embodied and operational environmental impacts during the full building life cycle. An EBD is much like an environmental product declaration (EPD) which is intended for marketing and educational use, but instead of covering individual products like an EPD, an EBD covers the whole building. Lastly, the LCA results of the Design Building were then compared with a functionally equivalent steel and concrete building to acquire the whole building LCA credit in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) v.4 for green buildings. With the mass timber use in the Design Building, the building qualified for the whole building LCA credit in LEED v4. With this project, FPL is helping to standardize environmental performance reporting and advanced mass timber building sustainability.