Carbon emission scenario of conventional buildings

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a very familiar methodology to measure the environmental effects of any products where all the process associated with the products from cradle to grave was analyzed and the possible emission to environment can be identified. In this study we applied LCA on three traditionally constructed reinforced concrete buildings (one five storied residential building, one three storied office building and one three storied educational building) where no environmental issues were considered during design and construction period. The aim of this research is to evaluate and compare energy consumption and carbon emissions of three different types of buildings from their materialization stage to the end-of-life stage. This paper also describes the step-by-step process of quantifying the overall carbon emission from a building systematically. There is an overview of how emission varies according to buildings material, construction process and objective of buildings. The result shows that the operational phase is mainly responsible for maximum carbon emission due to maximum energy consumption among three phases of life cycle assessment. However, it is also found from the study that the materialization and operation stages together contribute more than 97% of total emissions. Since a huge amount of operational energy is required for commercial building compare to other two buildings, it consumes energy comparatively higher than residential and educational building which results in 13.6% more emission than residential building and 19% more than educational building.

Life Cycle Assessment and Circular Building Design in South Asian Countries: A Review of the Current State of the Art and Research Potentials

“…LCA is becoming more widely acknowledged as a cutting-edge methodology to sustainability in the construction sector. LCA is a methodology used to assess resource use, energy use, waste generation, and many other global environmental impacts throughout a project's lifespan [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. The LCA method helps to better visualize and provide answers to questions like what kind of material or constructive process can make a building more sustainable?…”

“…A significant number of studies have been carried out to assess the environmental impacts produced during the life cycle of buildings (Table 4), and most of them relied on a life cycle assessment to provide quantitative data on the environmental impacts generated during the construction of a building from the raw materials extraction phase to the end-of-life phase ( [12,13,18,19,23,24]). Applying LCAs to whole buildings may be valuable under many points of view, from understanding (and minimizing) the overall impact that the building process may have to identifying the processes and components that mostly affect those impacts, and, thanks to building information models (BIMs), to identify the optimal maintenance strategies.…”

“…In the selected literature, LCAs have been performed on different categories of buildings such as residential, office, institutional, and educational buildings. The largest number of studies involved residential buildings ( [1,18,23,24]), followed by institutional buildings ( [19,25,26]) and educational buildings ( [13,23]). Residential buildings were preferentially selected because of the ease of obtaining data and also the use of simpler building processes (as residential buildings are inherently simpler than commercial or institutional buildings).…”

“…Table 4 summarizes the selected papers, grouped according to the impact categories they used. The most common impacts selected by studies on building construction materials are global warming potential and CO 2 emissions ( [1,2,13,18,19,[23][24][25][26]). Among the other impact categories, ecotoxicity, human toxicity, natural resource depletion, and ozone depletion were frequently assessed.…”

The efficiency of photovoltaic panels to meet energy demand of a school building in the Mesopotamia region

“…To reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, the design of the buildings and the energy source should be chosen to reduce energy consumption. [9]. Additionally, economical savings from the utilized energy by buildings can be employed for the development of undeveloped countries.…”