Summary Draft 2

 IMPORTANCE OF CONDUCTING LIFECYCLE ASSESSMENT (LCA) ON GREEN BUILDING MATERIALS

  California’s Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery's article, Green Building Materials (n.d.) states that using green building materials encourages the conservation of waning non-renewable resources globally, reduces building owners' and occupants' costs throughout the building's lifecycle, helps conserve energy, improve occupant productivity and health, and provide enhanced design flexibility. 

Hence, making early design selections and establishing strategies are essential for green building materials (Froeschle, 1999). The environmental assessment of materials and buildings is convoluted due to its subjectivity and complexity (Saghafi & Teshnizi, 2011). The choice of building materials influences the overall performance of a building, and the materials' impacts should be considered "from cradle to grave" (Song & Zhang, 2018, p. 2). The Lifecycle assessment (LCA) is a multifaceted system of qualifying and comparing inflows of materials, energy usage, and emission outputs with regard to building materials at varying spatial scales and contexts (Finnveden et al., 2009, as cited in Ding, 2014).

 LCA does have its limitations in evaluating green building materials, due to data limitations (Finnveden et al., 2009). However, given its critically on sustainability, it is imperative to have a complete lifecycle outlook toward selecting green building materials to holistically determine their impacts on the built and natural environment.