What is EcoEffect?

Environmental impact can be described as negative impact on human health, ecosystem and future accessibility to natural resources. Anticipated future lack of land for recreation and biological production make that exploitation of land for buildings and infrastructure sometimes is looked at as a general environmental impact as well. EcoEffect is a method to calculate and assess environmental loads caused by a building during an assumed lifetime. It is developed for persons who plan, manage or use the built environment and need information about the environmental load of different objects. Energy use, Materials use, Indoor environment, Outdoor environment and Life cycle costs are areas dealt with and the assessments are based on life cycle analysis (LCA) and criteria.

At Bo01 in Malmö EcoEffect was tested

The results are presented as an environmental profile for each area with about 10 bars showing the environmental load for different impact categories. A method to aggregate this information to 2 or 3 environmental load numbers for every area has been developed to simplify a comparison between buildings or estates. For energy and materials use there are environmental load numbers for emissions, waste and natural resource consumption, for indoor environment ill health and discomfort, for outdoor environment ill health, discomfort, and lack of biological diversity and productivity.

A summary describes procedure and principles for an environmental assessment. A computer programme, so far with a limited database, has been developed for the calculation of environmental impacts and for presentation of the results.