The construction industry has a significant negative impact on resource consumption and the environment. To reduce this effect, sustainability rating systems like Leadership on Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) have been introduced to evaluate the performance of buildings from sustainability perspective. This evaluation is carried through a merit/credit system where each credit addresses a specific sustainability concern and is assigned a certain weight. Although newer versions of these rating systems have included some points that adopt the concept of life cycle analysis (LCA), one further way to optimize utilization of credit systems is to perform an objective analysis of the credit weights through quantification of the potential positive impact associated with each credit. This study covers a simplified parametric analysis using an LCA technique to assess different approaches that can be pursued to achieve the target credits. The parametric analysis helps to identify the optimum approaches that, while achieving the target scores, lead to maximum saving of environmental impact.
