Ottawa, Ontario (PRWEB) March 31, 2014
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to help sustainable design move towards a performance basis. An analytical method for estimating lifetime environmental impacts due to a product or process, LCA can help building designers quantify and validate their sustainability decisions. LCA measures resource consumption, waste creation, and potential impacts on air, land and water due to constructing, using and disposing of a building.
Four green building programs now have incentives for designers to use LCA to minimize the embodied environmental footprint of new construction. The LCA provisions in LEED®, Green Globes®, the IgCC and CALGreen are easier to achieve than they look. The Athena Institute announces a new guide that demystifies the credits and explains how the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings makes compliance easy.
The 'Athena Guide to Whole-Building LCA in Green Building Programs' summarizes and interprets the various program provisions, provides tips on how to incorporate LCA during the building design process, and presents Athena's supplementary best-practice recommendations for performing whole-building LCA in general.
Readers of the new guide will learn what to include to meet compliance requirements, how to develop a reference building design, how to reduce the environmental impact of a building design using the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, and more.
The Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings is the only North American LCA software tool specifically developed for building designers, free of charge and fully compliant with green building programs. Get the free software here and the free guide here.
ABOUT THE ATHENA INSTITUTE
The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute is a non-profit consultancy and think tank in LCA for the built environment. The Athena Institute has continuously maintained its free Impact Estimator software tools since 2002, as part of its mandate to bring LCA to the construction sector for a verifiably sustainable future.