Japan: Life-Cycle Carbon Assessment

This guide concerns the 'Life-Cycle Carbon, Japan 2022' tool. This tool is included with all Japanese building LCA licenses and reports on Global Warming Potential (GWP). This tool is adjusted for Japanese Carbon calculations.

The LCA is in compliance with EN 15978, EN 15804, ISO 14040,ISO 14044 and ISO 21929.

The LCA datasets are compliant with EN 15804 or ISO 14040/14044. 

The tool allows you to report on a wide range of life-cycle stages and includes the following:

• A1-A3 - Construction Materials (data from EPDs or Generic Datapoints)
• A4 - Transportation to Site (Based on Japanese
• A5 - Construction Site Operations
• B1 - Use Phase - Report on Refrigerants, Carbonation and Vegetation
• B3 - Repair Rate - (Japanese specific B3 repair rates)
• B4-B5 - Material Replacements - (Japanese specific service life settings)
• B6 - Operational Energy Use (Annual)
• B7 - Operational Water Use (Annual)
• C1 - Demolition (Scenarios available)
• C2 - Material Wastage Transportation, based on total material mass.
• C3 - Material Reprocessing, based on total mass of reprocessed or recycled products.
• C4 - Material Disposal / Landfill, based on total mass of disposed products.

This tool reports on Global Warming Potential (GWP kg CO2e) and Biogenic Carbon storage (kg CO2e bio).

It has access to global CML data and includes data from the Japanese Ecoleaf Database.

How to complete your assessment, step-by-step

On project setup, please ensure Selecting Project Parameters.

• For the 'Service life values' choose 'Technical service life'. The Japanese tool has a default service life already included with the calculation tool. 
• For the 'End of life calculation method' choose 'Market Scenarios, user adjustable (recommended)', this opens the 'Country specific end of life scenarios', and you should set this to 'Japan'.

1. Set your calculation period and building area

• Enter here the service life of the building required by the client or through regulations, for LCA this is also the reference study period/calculation period for the analysis. An often chosen calculation period is 60 years. This is the default calculation period in most BREEAM and LEED assessments.
• Enter the building area in the respective question form. Specify as a minimum gross internal floor area (GIFA). This will be used to provide results per one m2, in order to make a possible comparison between different projects. You can find out more about the building area here.

2. Enter your construction materials

• Enter your construction/building materials. Adjust their service life setting (Japanese service life setting is based on http://www.belca.or.jp/lcmdate.htm), transport setting, localization, wastage percentage and end of life process as seen fit. 
• You can adjust the repair rate (B3). The default rate are Japanese specific. (reference: calculation conditions from CASBEE_LCCO2 calculation sheet)
• You can choose to mark a material as a 'reused material' which removes A1-A3 and A5 emissions. For existing materials (e.g. re-used foundation) you can set the transportation distance to 0 to remove A4 emissions as well. Read more about that here. 
• You can set a custom classification or use private classifications if you have an Expert license. 

3. Enter your site operations (A5), energy (B6) and water (B7) demands (optional)

• For construction site operations specify the climate region and construction site area (question 1 in Construction site operations question form) OR input manually project-specific information in the questions 2-5.
• Include project-specific data for annual energy (kWh/y) and water (m3/y) consumption.

4. Fill in the emissions and removals query (optional)

• This query looks at the use-phase emissions generated by refrigerants, concrete carbonisation and vegetation carbon withdrawals.

Analyzing the results

The 'Life-Cycle Carbon, Japan 2022' tool reports on

• Global Warming (GWP, kg CO2e)
• Biogenic Carbon Storage (kg CO2e bio)

Under more actions you can get a results report in Excel format.