How can you use LCA and CBA to design sustainable and cost-effective facilities?

1 What is LCA?

LCA is a method that assesses the environmental aspects and potential impacts of a product, service, or system throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal or recycling. LCA can help you identify the environmental hotspots of your facilities, such as energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, waste generation, and land use. LCA can also help you compare different design options, materials, technologies, and scenarios to find the most environmentally friendly solutions.

2 What is CBA?

CBA is a method that compares the benefits and costs of a project, policy, or decision to determine its economic feasibility and efficiency. CBA can help you estimate the monetary value of the benefits and costs of your facilities, such as operational costs, maintenance costs, revenues, savings, externalities, and social benefits. CBA can also help you calculate the net present value (NPV), benefit-cost ratio (BCR), and internal rate of return (IRR) of your projects to evaluate their profitability and attractiveness.

3 How to use LCA and CBA together?

LCA and CBA can be used together to provide a comprehensive and holistic assessment of the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of your facilities. By combining the environmental and economic aspects, you can identify the trade-offs and synergies between them, and optimize your design and management decisions. For instance, you can select the most suitable materials and technologies based on their environmental performance and life cycle costs. Additionally, you can design your facilities to minimize energy use, water use, waste generation, and emissions, while maximizing resource efficiency, renewable energy sources, and recycling opportunities. You can even evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of different scenarios such as retrofitting or expanding your facilities. Furthermore, you can communicate the environmental and economic benefits of your facilities to your clients, stakeholders, and regulators to justify your choices.

4 How to conduct LCA and CBA?

To conduct LCA and CBA, you need to follow a systematic and transparent process that involves several steps. This includes defining the goal and scope of your assessment, collecting and analyzing data on inputs and outputs of your facilities, calculating the environmental impacts of your facilities using appropriate impact categories and indicators, calculating the economic impacts of your facilities, interpreting the results of your assessment, reporting and communicating the results of your assessment, and providing recommendations and conclusions. Furthermore, you should use sensitivity analysis, uncertainty analysis, and multi-criteria analysis to compare the alternatives and scenarios.

5 What are the benefits and challenges of using LCA and CBA?

Using LCA and CBA can provide several benefits for your facilities engineering practice, such as improving environmental and economic performance, enhancing innovation and creativity, supporting decision making, reducing risks and liabilities, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as demonstrating social responsibility and compliance. However, it can also pose some challenges, such as finding reliable data and information, dealing with data gaps and uncertainties, choosing appropriate methods and tools, balancing the complexity of your assessment, addressing the limitations of your assessment, and managing the resources required for your assessment.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?