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Life Cycle Assessment

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Life cycle assessment is internationally used to assess the potential environmental performance of a product from an initial concept to the end of the products life. LCA considers five main areas that include resources, manufacturing, distributions, use, and end of life. Since all products are in some way harmful to the environment, lifecycle analysis helps to determine which products are most harmful based on the resources, energy, and carbon consumed over a products life.
Life cycle analysis takes into account the impacts on the environment at each stage of a product’s life cycle, and highlights the stages where it is the most largely affected, which means that more time can be spent designing solutions, rather than finishing the project …show more content…
From the diagram left, you can see the combinations of the pillars- If the design accounts for the environment and economy; it is not warm and inviting to residents, making it unsustainable as it does not benefit human wellbeing. If it accounts for social and economic aspects, it is not liveable or eco-friendly, making it unsustainable as it does not take care of the natural resources we need to keep the planet functioning. If it does not account for the economical side, it is not liveable or viable as it does not take into account the costs of living and therefore makes it unsustainable. The only combination of these that creates pure sustainability is a combination of all three aspects, however sometimes compromises must be made in order to create a viable solution that works in the …show more content…
In industrialized parts of the world, such as New Zealand, consumption of materials and products is considered a virtue. Realizing the threats this makes to the quality of life for not only our generation, but the coming ones has begun to spread across many industries, from agriculture, transportation and manufacturing, to architecture. Researchers are beginning to develop methods of analysing the true cost of an economic activity over its entire life cycle.
Architecture is one of the most obvious forms of economic activity. A country’s economic development will create more needs for more factories, offices, houses, and apartments. In a household, growth of income due to economy leads to the desire for a larger residence with more expensive materials and furnishings. In the western world we are consuming more in smaller populations than large developing nations are. It is very hard to get by without the use of money, so we need to be careful to use materials that we use to create these products so that we are not endlessly spending money on pointless

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