Development of LCA Calculator to support community infrastructure co-design

Engineering Comes Home turns infrastructure design on its head. The project starts with household needs and looks outward to design technologies and infrastructure, not the other way around. It aims to put people and their... [ view full abstract ]

Engineering Comes Home turns infrastructure design on its head. The project starts with household needs and looks outward to design technologies and infrastructure, not the other way around. It aims to put people and their everyday needs and desires first, acknowledging complex patterns of resource consumption in households that arise from interactions with socio-technical systems. The paper presents how the project aims to support sustainable design by engaging local communities and system users and trialling infrastructure co-design methods to improve wellbeing and reduce resource and environmental impacts in delivering water, energy, food and waste services.

The project works with a case study community of social housing residents in London and aims to develop a prototype design toolkit of potential technical options for meeting household needs and their lifecycle resource and environmental impacts. As part of toolkit development, an open source life cycle assessment (LCA) calculator has been developed enabling community members to engage with decisions about infrastructure, taking into account lifecycle impacts of technology and material options.

This paper presents the development of LCA calculator and how it is used to support community infrastructure co-design. The LCA Calculator development to date has included a horizon scan of existing decentralised technologies and a synthesis of open LCA datasets for technologies and patterns of consumption and production. A beta-version of an LCA Calculator software tool has been developed to enable rapid assessment of conceptual design of engineering systems.

Examples of technology options included in the LCA Calculator include waste compactor, wormery compost, rainwater harvesting,and urban food growing. For each technology option and their reference system, the tool calculates material flow of resource consumption and waste generation at individual, household and community level. Sliders were used to allow users to choose the time scale (day, month and year) and key parameters of the different technology scenarios.

Building on the material flow, three key environmental impact indicators were used in the calculator including GHG emissions, water consumption and energy consumption. As the users change the scale and select different scenarios, associated impacts will change accordingly. The design of the LCA Calculator tool introduces community members in an accessible and easy-to-use manner to concepts important in circular economy and systems thinking necessary for infrastructure design.

The LCA Calculator was successfully tested at a community workshop, enabling clear engagement between engineering design choices and resource and environmental impacts. The LCA Calculator, a browser based application compatible with tablets, has been developed using open source datasets, the functional programming language Purescript. The paper demonstrates how engineering tools can be developed and used in community engagement in designing more sustainable and resilient community infrastructure.