When good enough is best: Simplified LCA for fast and reliable assessment in medium economy countries.

The construction sector generates large amount of waste and is generally considered as an important contributor to climate change. It induces as well irreversible changes in local eco-systems. To face these challenges, industries invest into so-called “green innovations”, and national or local public authorities are demanding scientifically based decision support. Within the available environmental assessment methodology, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been widely accepted as a relevant method and it led to the development of different sector-specific guidelines, databases and tools in several countries and mostly in Europe. However, such developments are up to now, not completely implemented in other countries and it may not be relevant to do so given the huge number of environmental information required in existing LCA databases. If the aim is to have a widespread use of LCA in the construction sector especially in Latin America countries, it is probably good enough to focus on the most relevant environmental flows (e.g., carbon dioxide, waste flows…) found critical for the building sector. The limitation of the number of environmental flows to collect then allows spending more resources on the characterisation of the highly variable natural resources routes and building materials’ manufacturing processes. By doing so, the use of LCA can be sized up while focusing on the most relevant environmental impacts. The Swiss and Brazilian teams are willing to promote the use of a simplified LCA method based on forefront measures in order to grasp the variability of the field as well as an identification of the most critical process that should be reconsider in standard LCA database.