Integrating Life Cycle Assessment into Prefabricated Building Design: A Review of Data Requirements and Implementation Challenges

<p dir="ltr"><i>LCA is a well-established method for evaluating environmental impacts across a building’s lifecycle, with the greatest benefits realised during the design phase. Prefabricated buildings are increasingly recognised as a sustainable solution to the construction industry's environmental challenges, offering reduced waste, improved resource efficiency, and lower environmental impacts. Prefabrication, with its reliance on precise design data, can facilitate LCA application. While prefabricated buildings are better positioned than conventional construction to achieve sustainability, there are limited applications of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in this type of system, especially for design purposes. This study investigates the integration of LCA into prefabricated projects, with a focus on data requirements and associated challenges, to understand how these requirements can inform the design phase and support design optimisation. Through a systematic literature review, it examines prefabrication’s characteristics and explores lifecycle data requirements, collection processes and challenges. The findings reveal that most studies concentrate on the construction phase, with limited attention given to end-of-life stages or beyond. A key barrier is the lack of readily available, high-quality, prefabrication-specific data, which can discourage designers from adopting LCA. Contextual challenges also exist, further limiting LCA’s application. Additionally, end-of-life scenarios are often overlooked due to modelling uncertainties and the perceived negligible impact of these stages, despite their relevance for circular design, a sustainable approach. The review concludes that institutional support, methodological adaptation and practice-based examples are essential to overcoming existing barriers, standardising LCA practices in prefabricated construction and enabling its integration at the design stage, encompassing all life cycle phases.</i></p>