March 5, 2008

Athena Sustainable Materials Institute offers life-cycle assessments for buildings

Construction Corner

Korky Koroluk

Talk to construction people about the environmental challenge facing the building sector and you’ll encounter all sorts of attitudes and opinions.

For some, it’s still just about reducing waste on the jobsite. For others, it’s trying to manage projects more efficiently. Architects and engineers are looking for better ways to make a building and its systems more environmentally friendly.

All of which leads me to the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute.

The non-profit institute has been around for maybe a dozen years now, headquartered in Merrickville, a pretty little town on the Rideau Canal south of Ottawa.

Athena’s role is to help architects, engineers and others to evaluate the environmental impacts of buildings through something called life-cycle assessment (LCA).

Life-cycle assessment is not the same thing as life-cycle costing (LCC), about which we’ve heard so much in the last few years. That’s about dollars.

LCA is about assessing the environmental performance of materials, assemblies, even entire structures through their entire lives. That means going all the way back to mineral extraction, then on to manufacturing, transportation, installation, use, maintenance, demolition and disposal or recycling. It considers the potential effects on the depletion of fossil fuels, the use of other non-renewable resources, water use, depletion of the earth’s ozone layer, the potential to contribute to global warming, releases of toxins into the air, water or onto the land — just about everything environmental.

Last week I mentioned the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the manufacture of cement, but cement isn’t the only culprit.

Everything that goes into a construction project has some impact on the environment. We have to figure out how to minimize that impact.

That doesn’t mean going back to living in caves and walking everywhere, as some of the shriller of the global warming deniers would have you believe. But it does mean that we have to have a much fuller understanding of all the impacts and how they occur so that we can make intelligent choices about design and construction, about materials and their manufacture, about mineral extraction and transportation.

Consider this from the Athena website:

Building construction, renovation and operation, it says, consume more of the earth’s resources than any other human activity. Every year at least 40 per cent of the raw materials and energy produced in the world are used in the building sector. And this generates millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, toxic emissions, water pollutants and solid wastes.

“No other sector has a greater impact on the global environment,” it says.

That’s why, Athena says, learning how to build while keeping the environment in mind “is a necessary step that will have a tremendous positive impact.”

The science that will allow us to do that is complex, and will likely never be finished, since science — all science — is a work in progress. There is always something else to learn.

But the institute has developed a couple of software tools for designers that constitute important steps in the process. One, the Impact Estimator for Buildings, is capable of modeling most of the building stock in North America. The other, EcoCalculator for Assemblies, provides instant LCA results for common building assemblies.

Driving both are excellent databases for building materials and products assembled over a decade of work.

I’ll come back to this subject in a few weeks because I believe we all need a fuller understanding of the impacts of just about everything we do or use in the course of our daily work.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about Athena, point your browser at www.athenasmi.ca

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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