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Paradigms & methods·applied

Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)

Why it matters

A building's carbon story does not begin at the electricity meter. It begins in a quarry, travels through kilns and trucks and cranes, runs for decades of operation, and ends — well or badly — in disassembly or landfill. Life-cycle assessment is the accounting that refuses to look away from any chapter, and it exists because partial accounting actively misleads: a building can be "efficient" in operation while its concrete alone out-emits decades of the savings. Greenwash lives precisely in the chapters nobody audits. For a movement whose claims are its currency, whole-life carbon numbers separate a demonstrator that proves something from a showpiece that asserts it.

Role in 001's holistic picture

LCA is the audit function of the catalog: it verifies what Net-Zero, Fossil-Free Building claims, quantifies the savings from reclaimed sourcing and disassembly design, and consumes the data Building Instrumentation measures. In our consortium work it is also a product: the evidence layer that turns built pilots into replicable solutions others can adopt with numbers attached.

In the world

The method's honesty rests on a few disciplines. System boundaries are stated rather than smuggled. Data sources are named. The assessment runs twice: once before design decisions to steer them, once after construction to verify. All of it is achievable today, because the input data is already a public good. Germany's ÖKOBAUDAT publishes more than 1,400 environmental datasets for construction materials, energy, transport and disposal at no charge. These are the government-grade numbers a whole-life assessment runs on, free to anyone who wants to check the arithmetic. And the leverage they unlock exists only before the concrete is poured: an assessment run afterward can record the outcome, not change it.

How 001 engages with it

LCA is written into our consortium role at Unity Hub as a contracted deliverable: pre- and post-project assessments. The consortium plans to build them in One Click LCA, the whole-life carbon platform used across European construction. Monitoring plus LCA evidence is the "verify and package" stage of how 001 turns pilots into replication-ready outputs. House 001 runs the household-scale version in public. Its CO₂ ledger is itemized across exactly the life-cycle chapters: embodied savings (11 tonnes, one-time, from low-carbon construction) and operational savings (~2.4 tonnes a year: solar, solar-charged EVs that replaced a petrol car, fossil-free heating). That comes to a running ~17 tonnes and counting by 2026, a small honest whole-life account rather than a large vague one.

Maturity: applied. A contracted deliverable in consortium work; practiced at household scale in House 001's published ledger.

Further reading