CLEAR - An LCA model for Construction

31 Aug 2011

Allan Griffin, Iain Millar, Nick Avery, Nick Coleman, Peter Hodgson; Tata Steel RD&T Swinden Technology Centre, United Kingdom

Tata Steel Research and Development have developed a comprehensive, fully transparent, cradle-to-grave Life Cycle Assessment model which allows any multi-material building to be assessed. The model ‘Construction Life-Cycle Environmental Assessment Resource’ (CLEAR) allows the user to define key parameters in terms of building materials, lifetime, maintenance requirements and end-of-life scenarios and calculate the associated environmental impacts. It has also been subject to full critical review as required by the ISO14040 standard. CLEAR has been used to generate embodied carbon figures for 5 major building types with the aim to understand the implications for steel construction in the design of low and 'zero' carbon buildings. Going forward CLEAR will be further developed to allow non LCA experts within Tata Steel Europe to utilise the model through a simplified front end when dealing with customers.

Paper presented at LCM 2011, Berlin, Germany, August 29-31, 2011