The GREET team at the Life Cycle Analysis and Technology Assessment Department of Argonne National Laboratory is pleased to announce release of a new R&D GREET Building LCA Module.

The R&D GREET Building LCA Module is designed to conduct and compare detailed and transparent LCA of building materials/components/technologies, as well as whole buildings and building designs.

• Updated the existing user manual entry feature from the Building Materials tab to support use of environmental product declarations (EPD) focusing on data from A1-A3 product stage which encompasses the embodied impacts from raw materials, transportation and manufacturing building materials. This feature allows users to enter A1-A3 product stage data manually from EPDs and then customize other life-cycle stages by using process energy types and transportation data from R&D GREET1 2024 and R&D GREET2 2024 as well as other open sources. This allows for complete and accurate assessment of the construction and installation, use, maintenance, repair, replacement, and refurbishment, deconstruction and demolition, waste transportation, waste processing, disposal, and Re-X stages.
• Improved the Aggregated LCProfiles structure in a separate tab to serve as the full database for both building material LCA and whole building LCA. In this database, the life-cycle results are categorized by life-cycle stage, namely: raw material supply, raw material transportation, manufacturing, finished product transportation, construction and installation, use, maintenance, repair, replacement, and refurbishment, deconstruction and demolition, waste transportation, waste processing, disposal, and Re-X. This new structure supports selection of different system boundaries for whole building LCA such as cradle-to-gate, cradle-to-construction, cradle-to-use, cradle-to-grave, and cradle-to-cradle.
• We expanded the database of the R&D GREET Building module with a total of 40 window configurations, of which the thermal performance varies from a U-factor of 0.40 to a U-factor of 0.15.
• Created an “EPD” database in the Aggregated LCProfiles tab that holds the life-cycle results for aggregated A1-A3 data manually entered by the user.
• Expanded the Whole Building LCA tab including a new user interface:
• Added a sensitivity analysis dashboard to help visualization of alternative solutions.
• Added an option to aggregate or disaggregate Bill of Materials Data to support whole building LCA with a specific system boundary and to disaggregate LCA results with more detail. This allows the user to generate aggregated or disaggregated data. Disaggregated data generates results for every life cycle stage, per material per year. Results will be displayed for every life cycle stage up to the system boundary. Aggregated data generates results at the system boundary, per material per year.
• Enabled users to create refrigerant scenarios to account for the GHG emissions of refrigerants manufacturing, yearly refrigerant leakage from equipment, and leakages during equipment decommissioning.
• Updated Whole Building Emissions dashboard (Dashboard_WB tab) showing operational time-series emissions and breakdown of operational emissions by energy source.

• R&D GREET Building LCA Module: Technical Report (2.2 MB pdf)
• R&D GREET Building LCA Module: User Guide (2.7 MB pdf)

The R&D GREET Building LCA Module is developed with Microsoft Office 365. For best performance of the Module, we highly recommend using Microsoft Office 365 to run the Module.