System for selecting environmentally-sustainable building products

A system for selecting building products based upon environmental and economic factors comprising:

• a. a database having prestored information for a plurality of products categorized by product type having information for a plurality of environmental impact parameters, as well as well as monetary cost information for the entire lifecycle of each product, the database also having a benchmark for each environmental impact parameter for a given category and subcategory;
• b. a user interface capable of interactively receiving information from a user and providing graphical displays to the user;
• c. a filtering device coupled to the user interface and the database, capable of receiving the products selected by the user for comparison, and acquiring information from the database for these selected products;
• d. a building scenario device coupled to the user interface, filtering device and the database, functioning to receive the information selected by the filtering device, receive the benchmark for each environmental impact parameter for a selected group products from the database, and create a graphical display of the information for each environmental impact parameter against its corresponding benchmark for each selected product that is displayed on the user interface, and allows the user to select products to be used in a project;
• e. a payback device coupled to the user interface, and the filtering device, which operates to receive the cost information and cost savings information for the selected products, and calculate how long it would take for the cost savings to equal the a difference in costs;
• and provides the results to the user interface for display.