Standards and Developments in the Field of Sustainability and Life Cycle Assessment of the Construction Sector

Dear Colleagues,

The world has become increasingly focused on sustainability and reducing the environmental impact of products and services, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become an important tool for evaluating the environmental performance of products and processes, including those related to the construction sector.

LCA is a technique used to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction to end-of-life or recycling. It provides a comprehensive and holistic view of a product's environmental performance, considering factors such as energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and resource use.

There are currently several international standards for conducting LCA, including ISO 14040 and 14044, which provide guidelines for conducting LCAs in a consistent and transparent manner. However, there are ongoing debates within the LCA community about the best ways to conduct LCAs in complex products such as buildings and how to improve the accuracy and reliability of the results. One of the most important challenges nowadays is to find specific life cycle data of most construction materials to conduct accurate life cycle analysis at the building and other constructions scale.

Topics covered in this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

• The use of LCA in the construction sector;
• The strengths and limitations of using the LCA method in the construction sector;
• The use of LCA in policy and decision-making;
• The integration of LCA with Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA);
• The role of LCA in BSA;
• The role of LCA in driving innovation and sustainable product design;
• Development and trends to straightforward the use of LCA in the construction sector;
• The strengths and limitations of using the LCA method in natural-based materials.

Dr. Raphaele Malheiro
Dr. Ricardo Mateus
Dr. Rute Eires
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Standards is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainability
• methodologies
• standards
• materials
• new products