Open Collections

Fred Kaiser building : final report

University of British Columbia. Campus and Community Planning

This summary precedes the report which constitutes a part of the UBC LCA project. This is a studentcompleted project by Nick Gagliano as a technical elective in the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia. As part of coursework in CIVL 498C, this final project constitutes the main deliverable: a critical review of a prior student’s work and a plethora of research on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). In prior years, students had completed LCA models of various academic buildings on campus to varying degrees of accuracy and presented them in a report. This year, each student was assigned a building and the task is to critically review and update the model, and work towards formulating a benchmark for future planning decisions. The building I reviewed was the Fred Kaiser Building (Kaiser). Methods of corroborating the values presented in the original model included revisiting the annotated construction drawings in OnScreen TakeOff where the original modeller did their takeoffs, comparing these to the Inputs and Assumptions document and the actual Athena model, and iterating back-andforth between all these forms of data. My model was fraught with errors due to carelessness (wrong numbers with no assumptions entered) and takeoffs that didn`t even exist as well as missing construction drawings. In order to complete this project, many assumptions were made and I did the best to complete this in the time constraints provided. The results of the LCA model were then used to both establish a benchmark and then make comparisons between our individual models and the benchmark. In the report, many conclusions about the data are presented. The main ones are that 1. There was some confounding factor skewing the A11 Foundation values by over 90% from the benchmark. 2. In terms of newer construction, Kaiser is one of the lower-cost, lower impact options which serves as a good design example for future buildings 3. In general, results for the Kaiser building were very different from the benchmark (no conclusions can be drawn from this) The final sections of this report highlight methods to operationalize LCA at UBC and make use of the benchmarking we did in this class in real life. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Text

University of British Columbia. CIVL 498; UBC Social Ecological Economic Development Studies (SEEDS) Student Report

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0108839

Applied Science, Faculty of; Civil Engineering, Department of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/