Comparative Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction Performance of Reinforced Concrete and Timber Stadiums—A Case Study in China

Abstract

Many stadiums will be built in China in the next few decades due to increasing public interest in physical exercise and the incentive policies issued by the government under its National Fitness Program. This paper investigates the energy saving and carbon reduction performance of timber stadiums in China in comparison with stadiums constructed using conventional building materials, based on both life cycle energy assessment (LCEA) and life cycle carbon assessment (LCCA). The authors select five representative cities in five climate zones in China as the simulation environment, simulate energy use in the operation phase of stadiums constructed from reinforced concrete (RC) and timber, and compare the RC and timber stadiums in terms of their life cycle energy consumption and carbon emissions. The LCEA results reveal that the energy saving potential afforded by timber stadiums is 11.05%, 12.14%, 8.15%, 4.61% and 4.62% lower than those of RC buildings in "severely cold," "cold," "hot summer, cold winter," "hot summer, warm winter," and "temperate" regions, respectively. The LCCA results demonstrate that the carbon emissions of timber stadiums are 15.85%, 15.86%, 18.88%, 19.22% and 22.47% lower than those of RC buildings for the regions above, respectively. This demonstrates that in China, timber stadiums have better energy conservation and carbon reduction potential than RC stadiums, based on life cycle assessment. Thus, policy makers are advised to encourage the promotion of timber stadiums in China to achieve the goal of sustainable energy development for public buildings.Sustainability 2020, 12, 1566 2 of 24 carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) [4]. The use of fossil fuels is believed to be the main factor leading to global warming [5,6]. Global warming is widely considered to cause glacier retreat and regional climate changes, species extinction, and further uncertain risks [7,8].Measuring the "greenhouse effect" for mitigation purposes has become a major interest internationally in the last few decades. During the last 50 years, global warming has mainly been caused by excessive GHG emissions due to human activities [9]. International Energy Outlook (2019) reported that the building sector, one of the most important areas of human activities, accounted for 20% of the world's delivered energy consumption in 2018 [10]. This figure will rise to about 22% by 2050 [10]. The Brown to Green Report (2019) showed that carbon emissions directly from the building sector accounted for 9% of G20 energy-related CO 2 emissions in 2019 and that 18% of these emissions arose from electricity use in buildings [11].At the end of 2016, the energy consumption of buildings in China was 26 billion GJ, accounting for 20.6% of the country's total energy consumption. In total, the building industry emitted 1.96 billion tons of CO 2 in this year, accounting for 19.4% of domestic carbon emissions [12]. At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference [13], the Chinese government set the goal of reducing carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 60%-65% by...

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