Appendix: Building LCA and BIM Practices in Iceland

The interviewed LCA-expert is a “Technical draftman” (AutoCad, Revit, Inventor) and studied architectural technology and construction management in Denmark and the final project was about LCA. Currently works in the government projects to help this big change in Iceland.

National building regulation is being planned, and this has been announced in June 2023.  According to plans, the regulation will come into force in the year of 2024, and the work for defining the regulation is ongoing. The harmonisation with the other Nordic countries is considered to make it possible to make comparisons. Using BIM in LCA calculations is not going to be required, but nearly all in Iceland use it anyway.

The regulation is planned for all types of buildings for new construction projects, including single family houses, apartment buildings and all most common building types. The plan is to have LCA calculation required in the planning phase and in the as-built phase. The limit values are planned to be in use in 2026.

The general guidelines behind all Nordic methods are EN15978 standard and Level(s) framework, which leaves a lot of room for specification to create calculation methods. Iceland is cooperating with the other Nordic countries to define the more precise method.

Most of the new governmental building projects in Iceland are BREEAM projects, which leads to LCA calculations in the design phase and repeated in handover. In handover the EPDs are collected but those do not exist for all products. If no EPD data is not available, other Nordic data or OneClickLCA database data is used. Sometimes the emission data has to be evaluated with some reference data. This is the main driver at the moment for the LCA calculation of building projects but the legislation which is being prepared will also be a driver.

The calculation is planned to cover A1-A3, A4-A5, B4, B6, C and D and the calculation period will be 50 years. As the legislation is still being developed, very precise definition of the system boundaries does not exist yet. The goal is to make the transition smooth and are therefore trying to get industry involved in the process.

New construction will need to do energy calculation with the future emission values from energy authorities. As 90% of the buildings in Iceland use geothermal heating, which is green energy.  There will be less variation over the years compared with many European countries with varying heating energy sources.

Assumptions are made for the material selection in the beginning phases, which will then evolve and maybe change later. General average values will be needed, for example in the A4 and A5 phases.

The regulations do not exist yet but there is a desire to have traceable data. There is also a plan on creating a database with Icelandic construction products and Icelandic typical building elements.

The most common way of calculating the buildings LCA at the moment is using OneClickLCA-tool but also LCAbygg is used. The calculators will be allowed to decide which tool they want to use, Excel might be sufficient in the beginning.

The interviewed BIM expert is a board member in BIM Iceland and has practical experience in BIM modelling from several years.

BIM is applied in the design of larger projects in Iceland, like multistorey buildings in general, and is almost mandatory for those. In private housing projects and renovation, BIM is not used widely. In BIM projects, all disciplines are modelled, but only architects may use modelling in all design phases. With the new building regulations that are under development the plan is to allow model-based submission for building permit, but it’s unclear when that will be applied and what requirements the models will have. Currently drawing submission is needed for applying for building permit.

Most used BIM software include Revit and other Autodesk software, and some usage of Tekla Structures. For BIM-coordination and clash detection is used Autodesk cloud service (BIM360) and for more detailed checking Solibri Model Checker and Autodesk Navisworks.

At the national level, the BIM Iceland committee is coordinating developments and brings stakeholders of the domain together for this. A few public and private clients, authorities, architects, engineering consultants and contractors are attending the work of the committee on a voluntary basis. There is no buildingSMART Chapter in Iceland, although it is under discussion in the committee to become part of BuildingSMART.  

There is no national level guidance for BIM usage, but large clients, especially public clients, have their own requirements and guides for BIM usage. During the past years, also private clients have started to create company-specific procedures and documentation for BIM utilisation. In the private sector, usage concentrates on larger companies.

At the project level, the modelling practices and level of detail in different phases may be planned, but the plan may be more indicative and not implemented on a detailed level.

The naming depends on the modeller and the quality of the quantity take-off can vary. The naming matching the naming in OneClickLCA programme would be beneficial to enhance the quality of LCA calculations.

Quantity take-off from BIM depends on design discipline, e.g. quantities of steel structure can be obtained from modelling software. In general, the quantity take-off is used for benchmarking and evaluating the level of quantities but some disciplines can use quantity take off directly from the models. In the latest hospital projects (public) the aim is for BIM quantification. One or two large contractors in Iceland can do BIM-based quantity take-off.

The problem in using BIM data for LCA is the material naming in BIM. There is variation in the naming, and those differ by public and private clients’ projects or in building and infra construction. Also, the usage of wrong modelling tools makes it more difficult to automatically identify and calculate quantities correctly. This concludes in situations where LCA specialists have collected data from different sources or in the early design phase to check correct assumptions of missing information from designers.

In using OneClickLCA, only a few data types from original BIM data are read, and those shall be in the correct property field in native authoring software; otherwise, those are not read in LCA software. The interviewees’ company have created guidance for naming and storing information in BIM to make data transfer more fluent.