How would your floors stack up under a 75-year economic cost assessment? 

As a standards development engineer and quality manager at IPA Labs, I’ve seen the need to ensure that floors aren’t just environmentally sound but also economically sustainable. Consequently, we now offer individual life-cycle cost analysis services to determine the cost of a product over the estimated life of a building.

A Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) can help you determine the most cost-effective flooring options and achieve the highest possible value for your structure.

The life cycle of a floor

Some flooring, such as ceramic tiles, can last for centuries (by evidence of historical architecture and archeological remains). How long we expect contemporary installations to last depends on an array of factors, such as the construction material used, soil load, wear pattern, abrasive conditions, and more. Carpet, for example, is often expected to perform for 8-12 years in a residence before needing to be replaced, and possibly less time in a well-trafficked commercial property. 

Consequently, high-traffic facilities often choose durable, longer-lasting materials to help minimize replacements and reduce costs over the lifetime of a building. 

What is sustainable flooring?

Sustainable flooring minimizes the environmental, economic, and health-related footprints construction creates over time. One measure of a sustainable construction material is the product’s durability. A floor that lasts a long time is a floor that doesn’t have to be installed, repaired, uninstalled, discarded, and replaced at high economic and environmental costs.

While a particular flooring option may have a lower initial purchase and installation cost, it could also demand higher maintenance requirements and costs over its life cycle. Everything from daily cleaning and an annual maintenance cycle to repair and replacement frequency will affect your budget.

What is a life cycle cost analysis?

An LCCA is the overall investment cost of a product or material through its entire life cycle. While other sustainability analyses consider the environmental impact of a flooring product, an LCCA looks at its economic impact. 

An LCCA evaluates several post-production cost categories that can affect your flooring budget over a building’s expected lifetime, such as:

  • Materials costs: The purchase price of the flooring material used. 
  • Installation costs: The labor costs for each respective material type, often coupled with the material costs. 
  • Maintenance costs: Regular custodial treatment and repair work required to facilitate dynamic use.
  • Demolition costs: Expense of removing, demolishing, hauling away, and recycling flooring.
  • Replacement costs: The costs to install a new product after demolition of the old floor.

When a flooring product shows a low life-cycle cost, that means it likely won’t need to be replaced over the estimated useful life of the building. 

What’s the value of an LCCA service?

A life cycle  cost analysis can help when preparing project plans to show the overall life cycle cost of a material choice vs. the cost of the initial investment. 

The Tile Council of North America commissioned independent cost consultant Emily Lorenz to conduct a study comparing 18 popular flooring choices. The study used both a 75-year period and a 40-year period for analysis. It primarily used a 3% annual discount rate and expressed costs in net present values. The study assumed a medium-traffic commercial building.

Lorenz compared several kinds of ceramic tile, hardwood, laminate, carpet, vinyl, and other popular flooring choices. Quarry tile had the lowest life cycle cost at $0.95 per square foot cost per year, while sheet vinyl proved the most expensive at $2.26 per square foot cost per year over the life of a building.

Seeing the benefits of an LCCA for the flooring industry at large made it clear just how much value this analysis could provide an architect, investor, purchaser, or specificier. At IPA Labs, we now offer an LCCA service to help our customers make economically sound decisions about their specific flooring choices.

Who needs an LCCA?

In a world focused more and more on sustainability, a product with a long life cycle is a desirable choice. High- and medium-traffic commercial buildings, particularly those seeking to qualify for Green construction credits, and anyone seeking to understand the overall life cycle costs of a product, can benefit from the information an LCCA service provides.

At IPA Laboratories, we work with our clients to determine your desired project-specific inputs (flooring types to be analyzed, cost frequencies, etc.) to provide a customized LCCA report containing overall life cycle costs. 

Information from an LCCA can help you maximize both your floor’s lifespan and your construction dollars. Contact me at gdavidson@IPAlaboratories.com or reach out to our team for more details.