Athena SMI
Databases
 
 
The Difference
Between LCA and LCI

LCA is a method for assessing the environmental performance of a service, process or product, including a building, over its entire life cycle. Basic steps include goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. The life cycle inventory analysis (or LCI) involves detailed tracking of all the flows in and out of the system of interest, including raw resources or materials, energy by type, water, and emissions to air, water and land by specific substance. This kind of analysis can be extremely complex and may involve dozens of individual unit processes in a supply chain (e.g., the extraction of raw resources, various primary and secondary production processes, transportation, etc.) as well as hundreds of tracked substances.

Athena Life Cycle Inventory Product Databases


In our drive to provide the building community with better information and tools, the Athena Institute has since its inception been conducting research to develop a set of comprehensive, comparable life cycle inventory (LCI) databases for building materials and products.

Building material life cycle inventory databases are at the heart of our software tools - the ATHENA® Impact Estimator for buildings and EcoCalculator for Assemblies - as well as our research program. In fact, most of the research we do goes into developing, verifying and updating the databases that form the basis of our tools. To date we’ve spent more than $2 million on database development with the express purpose of making our inventory databases as comprehensive and reliable as possible.

We usually contract with industry experts to conduct the life cycle inventory for a particular industry or product line and have them follow our rigorous life cycle research guidelines. In this way we benefit from their first-hand knowledge and contacts while achieving certain scale economies by covering an industry’s complete building product line. For example, in our gypsum wall board study we not only studied regular gypsum board, but also the related finishing tapes and muds as well as fire resistant, moisture resistant, shaftliner, mobile home and gypsum fiberboard. As a result we provide users of our tools with an unparalleled level of detail and specificity.

We have also developed databases for energy use and related air emissions for on-site construction of a building’s assemblies; for maintenance, repair and replacement effects through the operating life; and for demolition and disposal.

Further, our databases are regionally sensitive, taking into consideration manufacturing technology, transportation and electricity grid differences as well as recycled content differences for products produced in various regions. Our databases are built from the ground up using actual mill or engineered process models and are not reliant on trade or government data sources.

Clicking on the “Structural Products” and “Envelope Products” links for listings of the materials and products currently covered in the Estimator software, which in turn forms the basis of the EcoCalculator.

The life cycle inventory and related reports for these materials and products are now available as an online companion to the ATHENA® Impact Estimator for Buildings software and are available here.

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ATHENA® is a registered trade mark of the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute
page updated  9 December, 2008