Optimizing environmental impacts of buildings, such as energy consumption, CO2 emissions, water and material use is a must nowadays. Building certification and standards serve as an opportunity to regulate such subjects. This paper investigates how the implementation of a new building quality standard in Estonia can improve the sustainability of buildings by looking into the quantifiable environmental impacts of a construction. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology is used to evaluate building certification schemes used within the new standard. The goal is to demonstrate if and how the Standard for Quality and Sustainable Real Estate Lifecycle stands for its name and addresses the life cycle impacts of a construction. This paper could serve as an illustrative example for the future users of the new building quality standard to better understand the aspects of its functioning and differences between certification schemes used within the standard. Furthermore, the results and the suggestions can help to look over requirements of the standard to refine them for a greater sustainability enhancement of the future buildings in Estonia. This paper is based on the results of master thesis at HafenCity University Hamburg, supervised by Dr. Wolfram Trinius and Prof. Irene Peters, defended on 26th of November 2015. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.