4. Summary and conclusions
The papers mentioned above represent, to the knowledge of the authors, the state of the art in the LCA analysis of tall buildings that is, as previously mentioned, a largely unexplored research field. The tall building industry and the researchers working on this unique building type need to cooperate in order to fill a fundamental gap in the pathway to constructing more sustainable buildings. In particular: 1. Designers and developers should make available to the public exhaustive bills of materials, where both the quantities and the prices of the purchased materials and services are detailed. This will allow the creation of a database of average quantities, as well as facilitate comparative studies of LCA results, obtained through the application of the different accounting methodologies. 2. Building owners and building managers should release detailed information on the real energy consumption of their buildings, so as to compare this easily calculated figure with the result of embodied-energy and embodied-carbon studies, in order to understand the real relevance of both from a life cycle perspective. 3. Researchers and environmental consultants should create precise, user-friendly software to enable tall building designers to look at LCA as a design-assisting tool, rather than as an appraisal method to evaluate, post-facto, a completed building. 4. Producers of materials should invest energy and resources to produce and made available to the public the Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) of their products, so as to enable more accurate and updated analysis from LCA practitioners. The authors hope these selections will inspire additional, and much-needed, research on this topic.
