Celebrate 25 years with us!

ID=3477 :: post_name=twenty-five-years-of-lca-leadership-for-the-built-environment :: post_title=Twenty-five years of LCA leadership for the built environment :: post_status=publish :: post_type=post :: post_category=Array

single.php

February 04, 2022

January 2022 marked the 25th anniversary of the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute.

Back in 1997, almost no one in the building sector had heard of life cycle assessment (LCA). But two visionaries recognized that a data-driven perspective was the ticket for verifiable results by the green building movement.

Twenty-five years ago, Jamie Meil and Wayne Trusty launched the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute, convinced that the future of sustainability is all about cradle-to-grave performance measurement and transparency.

Since 1997, the non-profit Athena Institute has been providing the leadership, data, tools, methods, and advocacy to ensure it’s done right for applications in construction.

We’re proud of our successes! Our leading-edge public service work and our free LCA resources have enabled the uptake of LCA in green building policy and programs across Canada and the US.

Our tireless advocacy for evidence-based sustainability decisions and life cycle thinking across the entire green building community helped bring LCA into the mainstream.

And we’re proud of the accomplishments within our community. Leading-edge manufacturers using LCA to reduce impacts and completely transform how they convey environmental information to stakeholders. Architects and engineers using LCA to reduce the environmental impact of buildings. Post-secondary students learning LCA, set to become tomorrow’s sustainability leaders.

We continue to work hard helping create the LCA ecosystem for next-generation sustainable manufacturing and green building design.

What we’ve been up to lately:

  • We helped write new North American guidelines for whole-building LCA, soon to be published by the National Research Council Canada – a proto-standard that will revolutionize practice.
  • We’re about to launch a complete overhaul of the Impact Estimator. This web app will be the most advanced whole-building LCA tool available for the N. American market – and still free!
  • We’re figuring out whole-building LCA benchmarking – finally, a system for making valid comparisons.
  • We’ve developed whole-building LCA comprehensive training in partnership with the BC Institute of Technology – filling a big gap to professionalize the practice.

Help us do more, faster: Join the Athena Institute or donate now

sidebar.php