Skip to Main Content
U.S. Forest Service
Caring for the land and serving people

United States Department of Agriculture

Home > Search > Publication Information

  1. Life cycle assessment and environmental building declaration for the design building at the University of Massachusetts

    Share via EmailShare on FacebookShare on LinkedInShare on Twitter
    Dislike this pubLike this pub
    Author(s): Hongmei Gu; Richard Bergman
    Date: 2018
    Source: Gen. Tech. Rep. FPL-GTR-255. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory. 1-73.
    Publication Series: General Technical Report (GTR)
    Station: Forest Products Laboratory
    PDF: View PDF  (5.0 MB)

    Description

    AbstractWith the world’s increasing focus on sustainability in the construction sector through green building systems, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been ac-tively engaged in green building advocacy in the United States through USDA Tall Wood Building competitions and follow-up research on use of mass timber for nonresi-dential buildings. The USDA Forest Service, Forest Prod-uct Laboratory (FPL) funded the study of environmental performance of the pioneer mass timber building (the John W. Olver Design Building) built at University of Massachu-setts Amherst in 2016. The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute conducted the whole building life cycle assessment (LCA) using the Impact Estimator for Building software. Secondly, the reported LCA results led to development of an environmental building declaration (EBD) in conformance with European standard EN 15978. Environmental build-ing declarations summarize the embodied and operational environmental impacts during the full building life cycle. An EBD is much like an environmental product declaration (EPD) which is intended for marketing and educational use, but instead of covering individual products like an EPD, an EBD covers the whole building. Lastly, the LCA results of the Design Building were then compared with a functionally equivalent steel and concrete building to acquire the whole building LCA credit in Leadership in Energy and Environ-mental Design (LEED) v.4 for green buildings. With the mass timber use in the Design Building, the building qualified for the whole building LCA credit in LEED v4. With this project, FPL is helping to standardize environmental performance reporting and advanced mass timber building sustainability.

    Publication Notes

    • We recommend that you also print this page and attach it to the printout of the article, to retain the full citation information.
    • This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain.

    Citation

    Gu, Hongmei; Bergman, Richard. 2018. Life cycle assessment and environmental building declaration for the design building at the University of Massachusetts. Gen. Tech. Rep. FPL-GTR-255. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory. 1-73.

    Keywords

    Mass timber building, environmental building declaration (EBD), life cycle assessment, cross-laminated timber (CLT), LEED

    Related Search

    XML: View XML
Show More
Show Fewer
Jump to Top of Page
https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/56321