Survey on LCA results analysis, interpretation and reporting in the construction sector

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely recognized as the most relevant tool to evaluate building environmental impacts. Previous works have proposed different building LCA tools to spread LCA in the building sector practices. However, as initial questions are different depending on the user profiles, answers should be different from a building LCA tool developer's perspective. Indeed, one single LCA tool embedding a single methodology and a single way to analyse and express the results will not fulfil the needs of all stakeholders. In this study, a national survey was conducted in order to better understand the needs of these building stakeholders to feed back LCA tool developers. Focus was put on the interpretation and reporting steps of the LCA method as defined in ISO 14040. Results showed different practices, expertises, and scope of studies. Stakeholders not familiar with LCA prefer easy-to-go interpretation while experts still prefers keeping detailed results. Outcomes of this survey can now be used by building LCA tool developers to better ajust the analysis and interpretation tools in their software to match the user needs.