TOTEM · LCA

Measure your environmental impact.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) to determine and optimise the impact of your building's materials.

You cannot choose between two construction options on the strength of their technical data sheets. You have to add up manufacture, transport, installation and end of life to see which of the two has the lower impact, and that is the calculation the study carries out, package by package.

TOTEM · LCA.

Measure the environmental impact of your building.

The life cycle assessment of your building, from the production of its materials to their end of life. Calculated in TOTEM, the results support a permit application just as they inform a design trade-off.

from€2,000excl. VAT

Request an LCA study

What you receive

The scope

The packages calculated and the life cycle stages covered, set at the outset based on your project documents.

The indicators

The impact of each package, in embodied carbon and across the TOTEM indicators.

The comparisons

Each material variant calculated on the same basis, and the difference between them quantified.

The report

The recommended decisions, and the data behind them.

The stakes

Measuring impact over the full life cycle.

The study adds up a building's impact over its whole life: manufacturing the materials, transporting them, installing them, maintaining them, then dismantling them. Our analysis assesses the difference between a conventional option and its low-carbon equivalent, and the final report underpins the decision.

Calculating the results in TOTEM.

We calculate the results in TOTEM, the reference tool in Belgium for the life cycle assessment of buildings, and we optimise them package by package.

Covering the whole building, from shell to fit-out.

We study materials and build-ups: a facade, a floor, a partition. The packages to be calculated are set at the outset, based on your project documents.

The steps

The file

Your drawings, your bill of quantities and the specification of the build-ups. A set of tender documents is enough. We then set the packages to be calculated and the comparisons to be made.

The model

Each package is modelled in TOTEM, then recalculated with the proposed substitute materials. Both versions run on the same basis and on the same set of assumptions.

The report

The report, the quantified comparisons and the recommended trade-offs. It informs a design meeting just as it supports a permit application.

The method

It calculates, compares and recommends, but it does not make the decision.

The calculation draws on the environmental product declarations (EPDs) where they exist, and when a product has none, we use a generic value for its product family and say so in the report. You therefore know, line by line, what rests on declared data and what rests on an average.

The project study takes over for the final choice of materials and the writing of the specification.

See the project study