Towards a comprehensive hybrid life cycle inventory for Chilean building materials

Economic growth often results in an increased demand for energy and resources. This is the case of Chile, a country that although has managed to become a leading economy in the South American region, is still strongly dependent on extractive industries and imported fossil fuels. In this context, the Chilean building sector is one of the largest consumers of energy and resources while responsible for a significant amount of its waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Although this has prompted initiatives targeting sustainable construction practices and building operational efficiencies, a comprehensive approach to account for the complete life cycle environmental performance of buildings remains an unmet need in part due to the lack of information on the performance of individual building materials. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a methodology to inform the compilation of hybrid life cycle inventories of Chilean building materials. The proposed methodology focuses on (a) gathering economic input-output, process-based, and environmental data, (b) data pre-processing, and (c) combining this information to generate hybrid coefficients based on the Path Exchange Method. The proposed methodology then used to calculate the embodied energy of seven locally manufactured building materials, demonstrating its capacity to inform the development of a comprehensive life-cycle inventory for Chilean building materials.