A WEB-BASED LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT PLATFORM FOR IMPORTED TIMBER PRODUCTS

Under the dual pressure of increasing housing demand and carbon reduction commitments, the greater use of timber has been proposed as a solution for Irish construction. To help promote timber construction in Ireland from a sustainability perspective, this research develops a new web-based platform for life cycle assessment (LCA) for imported timber products, which is currently lacking. By integrating trade data from the UN Comtrade and environmental data from the ECO Portal, this platform supports customised LCA for various imported timber products to a designated country, not only Ireland. During customised LCA, the cradle-to-gate global warming potential (GWP) values are generated and can be visualised in both table and graphical forms and the results and associated metadata can be downloaded in CSV format for further analysis. Under the condition of selecting multiple products, this platform also allows for the comparison between selected products to assist the decision-making process of timber product procurement. Moreover, data quality indicators are provided with both the results and environmental data, including time and geographical representativeness. In the future, the platform will incorporate more LCA databases and encompass more LCA modules related to embodied carbon assessment and domestically manufactured timber products will be supported as well.