Roles of the reference service life (RSL) of buildings and the RSL of building components in the environmental impacts of buildings

The Life Cycle Assessment of a building is a complex analysis that also involves the use of the predicted Reference Service Life (RSL) of the building components and materials, as well as the predicted RSL of the whole building. The RSL values of individual materials and building components can be obtained from different sources and are not exactly comparable. In the present study, the influence of selected RLS values on an LCA assessment was evaluated. Three different RSL databases were used as the sources of the data to estimate the environmental impacts of selected building components (internal wooden door and external finishing coat). Two scenarios were presented. In the first scenario a building component can be reused in another building, while in the second scenario the reuse of the building component is not possible. The study showed that dependent on the selected RSL database, the results can differ by up to a factor of five. Therefore, it is very important to describe clearly the maintenance scenarios for a building in order to have a reliable comparison of the results of LCA assessments.