The building sector is being called upon to help fight climate change by achieving ambitious reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time incorporating other “green” considerations. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – which allows the impartial comparison of building designs based on measures such as global warming potential – is an essential part of this effort and, thanks to the ATHENA EcoCalculator, is now more accessible than ever before to mainstream design professionals.
The EcoCalculator offers architects, engineers and others access to instant LCA results for hundreds of common building assemblies. The results embedded in the EcoCalculator are based on detailed assessments completed with the ATHENA®Impact Estimator for Buildings, which in turn uses Athena’s own widely-acclaimed datasets and data from the US Life Cycle Inventory Database (www.nrel.gov/lci 
).
Developed by the Athena Institute in association with the University of Minnesota and Morrison Hershfield Consulting Engineers, the tool was commissioned by the Green Building Initiative™ (GBI) for use with the Green Globes™ environmental assessment and rating system. Because of its value as an indicator of climate change impacts, the GBI supported the team’s creation of a generic version for use by the entire sustainable design community. This variant, the ATHENA® EcoCalculator, is available free of charge, in two versions: EcoCalculator for Commercial Assemblies and the new EcoCalculator for Residential Assemblies
