A Life Cycle Framework for the Identification of Optimal Building Renovation Strategies Considering Economic and Environmental Impacts

Abstract

It is well-known that the existing building stock is responsible for non-renewable resource depletion, energy and material consumption, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Life cycle analysis (LCA) procedures have thus been developed, in recent years, to assess the environmental impact of construction and operational phases through the entire building life cycle. Furthermore, the economic, environmental, and social consequences of recent natural disasters have encouraged the additional integration of hazard-induced impacts into common LCA procedures for buildings. Buildings are however expected to provide the population with safe living and working conditions, even when hit by different types of hazards during their service life, such as earthquakes. Hence, next-generation LCA procedures should include not only hazard-induced impacts, but also the contribution of potential retrofitting strategies that may alter the structural and energy performances of buildings throughout their remaining service life. This study presents a life cycle framework that accounts for the contributions of initial construction, operational energy consumption, earthquake-induced damage repair activities, potential retrofitting interventions, and demolition (considering also its associated potential material recycling), in terms of both monetary costs and environmental impacts. The proposed methodology can be used to undertake cost-benefit analyses aimed at identifying building renovation strategies that lead to an optimal balance, considering both economic and environmental impacts, between reduction of seismic vulnerability and increase of energy efficiency of a building, depending on the climatic conditions and the seismic hazard at the site of interest.

Aligning sustainability and regional earthquake hazard mitigation planning: integrating greenhouse gas emissions and vertical equity

“…These studies focus on case studies of a single building (Menna et The lack of comprehensive inventories on the material quantities associated with repair strategies has led numerous researchers to rely on Economic Input-Output LCA (EIO-LCA) frameworks for the environmental assessment of building damages (Comber et al 2012, Comber and Poland 2013, Simonen et al 2015, 2018, FEMA 2018, Asadi et al 2019, Huang and Simonen 2020, Caruso et al 2021a, 2021b. EIO-LCA requires product or activity cost information to be used within available tools that translate industry sector-specific costs into the corresponding environmental impacts (Caruso et al 2020). EIO-LCA is a well-documented method, however, its application requires deep insights into how the model and decision-support tool (eiolca.net) could be used correctly and accurately.…”

“…Furthermore, the potential energy savings might lead to cost savings for the impacted households. Although the benefits of integrated seismic and energy building retrofit interventions have been reported in the literature (Belleri and Marini 2016, Calvi et al 2016, Sassu et al 2017, Welsh-Huggins and Liel 2017, Lamperti Tornaghi et al 2018, Gkournelos et al 2019, Asadi et al 2020, Caruso et al 2020, 2021a, 2021b, Keskin et al 2021, Menna et al 2021, the energy savings due to energy efficiency improvements have not been considered in previous resource allocation frameworks for regional risk mitigation.…”

“…Discussions of the environmental impact of earthquakes on buildings have recently received increased attention. Researchers have conducted several LCA studies on the effects of structural hazard vulnerability on buildings' lifetime sustainability, focusing particularly on individual buildings (Comber et al 2012, Comber and Poland 2013, Menna et al 2013, 2021, Arroyo et al 2015, Feese et al 2015, Alirezaei et al 2016, Belleri and Marini 2016, Calvi et al 2016, Welsh-Huggins and Liel 2017, 2018, Lamperti Tornaghi et al 2018, Gkournelos et al 2019, Welsh-Huggins et al 2020, Caruso et al 2021a, 2021b, Lanza et al 2022 or a specific structural type (Chiu et al 2013, Wei et al 2015, 2016, Padgett and Li 2016, Sassu et al 2017, Simonen et al 2018, Caruso et al 2020. Nevertheless, this is the first study to identify optimal building retrofit policies from an environmental perspective at a regional scale by modeling prototype buildings that represent a large number of building types and sizes.…”

Integrating Regionalized Socioeconomic Considerations onto Life Cycle Assessment for Evaluating Bioeconomy Value Chains: A Case Study on Hybrid Wood–Concrete Ceiling Elements

“…When comparing the results in the assessment of relative advantages of the hybrid construction material, it is seen that these are in line with results on environmental advantages obtained in other studies for assessing impact-reduction potentials of green buildings, particularly for projects replacing cement components. Whereas fully wood-based building systems outperform steel-reinforced concrete systems normally in the range of 10-55% in most environmental impact categories, the case of wood-concrete systems may differ as they in some cases exhibit even higher environmental impacts as they lack in optimized substitution of cement [52][53][54][55][56][57]. Here the design of hybrid cassette systems has its intervention point because it can, on one hand, support in optimized substitution of cement, while on the other hand playing out the structural strengths of the individual building materials.…”

Clay-Based Products Sustainable Development: Some Applications

“…It must include the energy costs of extraction, transformation, transport and even possible recycling or disposal after the death of the raw materials, as well as of construction, maintenance and use of the building [7]. The implementation of an LCA highlights that the use of sustainable materials reduces the building's carbon footprint index after retrofit compared to standard materials, as seen in the case studies in the Mediterranean area [8][9][10][11]. In line with the previous studies, the results demonstrate that the energy consumed by buildings is largely deriving from the production of materials, their extraction, treatment and finally their waste.…”