This morning I had a meeting with Sebastian Welling from EPD and IVL at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH). I made a presentation about our project, our understanding of LCA and the different database we are working on.
He appeared to be interested in our research and the development of a tool that will allow LCA to be perform in earlier stages. Indeed, he agreed with us that LCA, as it is done today, have little to no impact on the building process as it is only the result of a measure and not a conception tool.
Then we went through the different database : the forms from byggvarubedömningen and the Idematapp2018.xlsx file from Delft University of Technology and the average of practice (previous average of project).
We started with the forms and the file from TU Delft. He acknowledge the amount of work we did and agreed that within the usual scope of LCA studies (shown below)
we would only be able to claim the “Raw material supply” in the stage 01 : Production. Therefore he advised us to include the transportation impact for this stage if its cost is more than 2% of the total cost.
He also provided us with more information about the EPS2015 and the Ökobandat database so that we could either directly use them as such or include parts of them in the database we are working on.
Then we presented the average of practice database and how it would be able to replace missing data when we perform LCA in earlier stages. With this database we also introduce the idea that we will actually conduct something we now called LCE for Life Cycle Estimation
Therefore, in the following weeks, while our colleagues keep on matching the form’s components with the Idematapp database (and maybe the EPS2015 or Ökobandat) we are going to keep on working on the average of practice