Conventional LCA techniques inadequately account for products' natural capital consumptions. Doing so would allow for more complete inter- and intra-sector comparisons of the life-cycle impacts of building materials such as wood, concrete and steel.

The EcoLCA method has recently arisen to address the challenge of providing comprehensive resource accounting in LCA and standardizing a unit for resource aggregation. To address the issue above, the proposed research seeks to accomplish the following objectives: (1) Compare the life-cycle performance of common building materials, such as wood, concrete, and steel, using the emerging EcoLCA technique and (2) use hybrid EcoLCA to characterize the environmental profile of current research on engineered wood based building materials. Within EcoLCA, Ecological Cumulative Exergy Consumption (ECEC) provides a standardized unit for comparing overall resource intensity.

While preliminary, this study compares four NAICS sectors using the online EcoLCA tool: Engineered Wood Member Manufacturing, Fabricated Structural Metal Manufacturing, Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing, and Reconstituted Wood. Early results suggest that the Ready-Mix Concrete Manufacturing sector has the largest ECEC per million dollars, while Engineered Wood Member Manufacturing measures the lowest . Results do not yet exist for the hybrid EcoLCA study of specific materials under development at the University of Maine’s Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center.