Building life cycles contribute substantially to the emission of greenhouse gases and energy consumption; this is especially true for the operation or use stage of the building. This work on a commercial building in Singapore extends the traditional system boundary drawn for a whole-building life cycle assessment to include the management of wastes produced during building operations. It was found that waste management produces much more emissions than the operation stage. This reinforced the notion that waste recycling should be further promoted in buildings, possibly through building level technological innovations and design modifications. An integrated policy framework was proposed to explore ways by which building level strategies can work with other strategies to holistically address the issues of waste reduction, sorting, collection and recycling. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.