A Harmonized Dataset of High-resolution Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment Results in North America

Building design practitioners are increasingly using life cycle assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impacts of their buildings. However, industry-generated LCA results are rarely compiled into comparable datasets and rarely made public. Thus, harmonized and open access datasets of building LCA results are limited, particularly in North America.
Here we present a novel high-resolution dataset of building design characteristics, life cycle inventories, and environmental impact assessment results for 292 building projects in the United States and Canada. The dataset contains harmonized and non-aggregated LCA model results across life cycle stages, building elements, and building materials to enable detailed analysis, comparisons, and data reuse. It includes over 90 building design and LCA features to assess distributions and trends of material use and environmental impacts. Uniquely, the data were crowd-sourced from designers conducting LCAs of real-world building projects.

This dataset fills critical gaps for the building industry, research, and policy communities, enabling them to analyze and compare the impacts of buildings, test or set performance targets, and motivate sustainable design and construction practices.