Life Cycle Assessment of Residential Buildings in the United States 1

Residential buildings are significant within the U.S. economy, not only in construction, but in maintenance and operation. The value of new construction of residences in 2000 was about 4.2% of the gross domestic product (USCB 2001a). By 1999, there were 105 million occupied residential units in the United States, and the residential sector consumed 18 trillion Btu of direct energy, representing about 19% of total U.S. energy consumption. In this chapter, we estimate overall environmental impacts of U.S. residences and discuss some approaches to ameliorate these impacts.