Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental Product Declarations - The Next Level of Transparency

LCA or Life Cycle Assessment. It’s as a tool that allows building professionals to understand the environmental impacts associated with the building products they select to use on their projects over the entire life cycle of the product. Scorecard approaches, like the LEED rating system, provide a specific list of do’s and don’ts to be applied during the design process. The credits earned by projects designed under LEED do not provide feedback on how well a product selection could perform, environmentally or otherwise, after occupancy.

LCA, on the other hand, is a look at a product’s environmental impacts at all stages of a product’s life and aids in architectural decision making to help you understand the environmental impact of product specification choices long term. LCA will likely replace the attribute driven selection criteria that was prevalent over the last several years in environmental rating systems like LEED.

Learn At Your Own Pace:

You can take this course and follow along at your own pace. Speed up, slow down, or stop now and finish later. Click "Take the Course Test" to go straight to the test and earn your credits. You'll know immediately if you have earned credits and you will be able to print out your certificate of completion instantly.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this course you will be able to:

• Understand the need to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment
• Introduce Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
• Interpret Environmental labels
• Understand, Read and Interpret Environmental Product Declarations
• Explain how EPD’s are currently being used and applied
• Describe the differences between LCA and an EPD
• Apply these tools (LCA/EPD) to formulating product specification choices

Course Outline:

This course is a presentation designed to earn you 1.00 AIA/CES Learning Unit. Use the onscreen controls to pace the presentation to your liking, and then click "Take the Course Test" to take the exam for this course and earn your credit.

• Life Cycle Assessment and Environmental Product Declarations - The Next Level of Transparency
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