Tool summary

Name of the tool
The Athena Model - Athena Sustainable Materials Institute

Description of the tool
Practical, easy-to-use decision support tool that provides high quality environmental data and assists with the complex evaluations required to make informed environmental choices. Our goal is to encourage the selection of material mixes and other design options that will minimize a building's potential life cycle environmental impacts and foster sustainable development. While there is a growing desire to put the environment on an equal footing with cost and other conventional design and product performance criteria, the task is by no means simple. It requires current, reliable and comparable environmental data in readily usable forms. The notion of Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been generally accepted within the environmental research community as the only legitimate basis on which to compare alternative materials, components and services.

With Athena all the basic LCA work is done out of the sight and mind of the user. Give Athena a design for all or part of a building and you get back an environmental profile without having to be concerned with the intricacies of LCA or even knowing you are doing LCA. Better still enter two or more comparable conceptual designs and Athena will compare them across as many as six environmental measures. They believe they are only one of two models that are at such a stage of advanced development and devoted to LCA of whole buildings (the other is EcoQuantum).

Specific topic
A life cycle assessment of components of buildings.

Sector/s of use

Waste	Energy	Water	Transport	Green/Blue	Building & Land use
0	1	1	1	0	0

M - main sector, 1 - sub sector and 0 - n/a

Scale of applications

Component	Building	Neighbourhood	City	Region
1	1	0	0	0