A Comparison of LCA Approaches for Existing Buildings Subjected to Earthquake Considering Environmental and Structural Performance

Natural disasters such as recent earthquakes have highlighted the importance of resilience against natural hazards as a key component of sustainability. Evaluating existing buildings under sustainable perspective requires the understanding of building’s life cycle stages exposed to these disasters. In comprehensive life cycle analysis (LCA) of a building, damage repair costs and downtime (economy component), environmental emissions and waste generation (environmental impact component), and deaths (society component) should be quantified and evaluated (Gencturk et al., Eng Struct 110:347–362 [1]). After an earthquake, the cost of damage repair and the resulting downtime can lead to negative impacts, including increased material and energy consumption and additional waste production. This is in addition to other significant impacts such as deaths and injuries. To mitigate these effects, researchers have adopted various approaches. They have evaluated the impacts on individual buildings in different forms and details, focusing either on the entire building or on specific building systems. In some cases, they have conducted comparative studies to assess the different impacts between two or more buildings, with the goal of optimizing a comprehensive model for a more sustainable structure. Most of the previous comparative LCA studies have been, however, applied to evaluate the environmental impact between two or more buildings without considering structural performance of the buildings. Recently, in addition to the environmental impact of the aforementioned conventional activities, researchers have attempted to incorporate seismic risks into traditional building LCA models and developed appropriate methods for comparing different design alternatives with respect to the impact of seismic damages and their recovery activities. The evaluation of five LCA studies, which took into account both the environmental and structural performance of earthquake-affected structural systems, will be the primary focus of this paper. The paper will also examine the main factors that influenced the assessment's findings and provide a summary of the most significant findings of them.