Is there a list somewhere of service providers that will do an LCA on your building? What do they charge?
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Cost of a whole building LCA and providers?
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Frances Yang
ARUP42 thumbs up
April 10, 2013 - 1:47 pm
An LCA of your building does not necessarily need to be done by an LCA specialist if your assemblies match up well with those offered in Athena Impact Estimator. However, if your building assemblies don't match well, you want something more refined to reflect the wider array of design opportunities and/or to reduce purchasing of offsets (such as in Living Building Challenge), you want to explore full life-cycle impacts (like design for deconstruction and operational energy reduction), or you simply don't want to have take the time to learn new tools, there are several consultants who can do this.
However, as I'm trying my hardest not to be self-promoting, I'm not going to name them and unfortunately, I don't know of a single list. Instead I'd say a place to start would be to call FPInnovations, Precast Concrete Institute, or the National Trust for Historic Preservation who have all recently commissioned whole building LCA studies, to find out who they sent out/received RFPs to/from. Some of the parties producing and peer reviewing EPDs will also do whole building LCA. EPD program operators include ASTM, ICC-ES, ULe, and NRMCA. (I might start backwards, as its often quicker to talk to the right person in smaller companies.)
The fee (based on what Arup might charge) could range from $5000 for a simple Cradle-to-Gate with good inventory and quant info on the bill of materials, to $25,000 for something more sophisticated that does the things mentioned above. Greater than $25,000 would be more likely a very wide options comparison sponsored by a trade industry. This is only my sense and I would love to hear what small projects have actually paid for LCA's.
Another thought is to recruit a graduate student in civil and environmental engineering or architecture. The current wealth of whole building LCA case studies comes from this pool, not actual projects. But you'll want to make sure their work is overseen by LCA faculty and, of course, that their timeline fits yours! MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley are big Buildings LCA hubs.
I hope this helps.