Environmental Profiling of Green Educational Building Using Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, architects and designers have been working towards minimizing the impact that buildings have on the environment. In spite of the fact that many architects claim their buildings are environment-friendly, the claims cannot be justified unless a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is conducted. The two major parts of the theoretical basis of the proposed scheme are the concept of sustainability of the environment and methods of assessing the building’s environmental impacts. The objective of this report is to evaluate the possible ecological impact of an educational building through its life cycle, from extracting raw materials to the end of life. In order to accomplish the goal of the study, a single-case method of a life cycle assessment was used to determine which stage of the life cycle (manufacturing, construction, consumption, maintenance, and dismantling) made the most contribution to the overall impact. The main installation system (foundation, frame, wall, floor, roof) of a building will have an impact on the environment during its life cycle. A typical new educational building was used as a case study in Islamabad, along with an optimized LCA method based on energy consumption inventories, the material input and output, and the assessment of the environmental impact.

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).…”

“…As no local database exists, researchers have been using the Eco-invent database in developing countries. With reference to tools, SimaPro [2,18,25], GaBi [22], ATHENA [13], Pareto analysis [19], OpenLCA [1], OneClick LCA [24], and Umberto NXT [12] have been used in the selected papers to perform LCAs.…”

“…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.…”