Enhancing Construction Sustainability: Standardized Life Cycle Assessments with Platform Thinking

Due to its substantial contribution to global warming, the construction industry consistently strives towards enhancing sustainability. Besides new strategies to enhance sustainability in construction, there is a need for accurate and efficient environmental assessments. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely adopted methodology to assess sustainability, also in construction. Despite its effectiveness, LCA remains resource-intensive due to repetitive analyses of similar construction components across projects. We explore the integration of platform thinking into the LCA methodology to enhance the efficiency of LCAs, and, ultimately, the sustainability in industrialized construction.
We draw on qualitative and quantitative data collected in close collaboration with Næste, a Danish modular shed producer. At its core, this research leverages the principle of standardization within a construction project to streamline the LCA process. By emphasizing parametric and modular calculation, we develop a framework to simplify LCA processes and examine how standardized construction components can support the implementation of the developed framework, especially in the life cycle inventory analysis.
The findings illustrate that the integration of platform thinking and LCA not only reduces the redundant calculation of similar components but also allows the dynamic calculation of LCAs accomodating real time changes, saving both time and effort in conducting LCA for modular construction. At the same time, this integration promotes more sustainable building practices as it enables consistent, updated and informed decision-making about material and design choices. The implications of this paper are not just limited to theoretical contributions but also offer practical insights into the adoption of platform thinking and LCA in construction. The integration enhances comparability as well as transparency in sustainability reporting, while it promotes real time emission predictability. Although this research has shown strong potential, the integration of platform thinking and LCA requires refinement through more practical cases and data, opening several avenues for future research. One of the most relevant avenues for further research seems to be the extension of the developed framework into an emission configurator as well as integrating socio-economical aspects to make it applicable to different contexts, in and beyond construction.