Life cycle assessment of a Danish office building designed for disassembly

Abstract

The building industry is responsible for a large proportion of anthropogenic environmental impacts. Circular economy (CE) is a restorative and regenerative industrial economic approach that promotes resource efficiency to reduce waste and environmental burdens. Transitioning from a linear approach to a CE within the building industry will be a significant challenge. However, an insufficient number of quantitative studies exist to confirm the potential (positive) environmental effects of CE within the built environment as well as a consistent method for characterizing these effects. This paper considers key methodological issues for quantifying the environmental implications of CE principles and proposes a life cycle assessment (LCA) allocation method to address these issues. The proposed method is applied to a case study of a Danish office building where the concrete structure is designed for disassembly (DfD) for subsequent reuse. The potential environmental impact savings vary between the different impact categories. The savings are significantly influenced by the building's material composition, particularly the number of component-use cycles as well as the service life of the building and its components. The substitution of other material choices (e.g. glass and wood) for the concrete structure exhibited a potential increase in impact savings.

Life Cycle Assessment of an Office Building Based on Site-Specific Data

“…It is difficult to compare studies involving LCAs on buildings since they target different buildings, functional units, system boundaries and method choices [9]. Previous studies that analyse a whole buildings during the full life cycle and present the impact share of the different building parts are [1,2,6,[8][9][10][11]14]. These also shows that energy use (B6) and production (A1-A3) represent a large share of the total environmental impact, similar to our results.…”

“…For studies of residential buildings, a likely explanation is that there are commonly fewer installations in these types of buildings than for commercial buildings. However, [1,2] have similar building types, office with concrete frame, but also report smaller shares of environmental impact from the technical installations. It is possible that these differences are caused by missing products in the inventory of these studies, but there are also other possible explanations: the buildings have less technical installations, the functional unit is different or that the purpose and therefore method choices are different.…”

“…It is possible that these differences are caused by missing products in the inventory of these studies, but there are also other possible explanations: the buildings have less technical installations, the functional unit is different or that the purpose and therefore method choices are different. The latter reason is indicated in [1], since the focus in that study was difference of several construction alternatives and only steel, iron, PVC and ceramics are reported for technical installations. In our study it was found that other materials in the technical installations, e.g.…”

“…Although several studies are available that assess whole buildings over their entire life cycle, e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], few studies deal with office buildings in particular, especially in the Nordic countries. International LCA studies that investigate whole commercial buildings are [1][2][3][4][5]11,16], of which [1] studied a section of a Danish office that was assumed to represent the complete building. Although many previous studies are ambitious and thorough, the usual approach is to estimate the amount of materials and products based on architectural drawings and to confer with experts.…”

Numerical Prediction and Corresponding Circular Economy Approaches for Resource Optimisation and Recovery of Underground Structures

“…(i) For aboveground infrastructures such as buildings, several studies have begun to explore ways to embody emission reduction and promote CE approaches in other stages of the life cycle, such as design [27][28][29] or end of life [19,30]. For instance, the reuse of concrete panels reduced the cost of new construction by 20-30%, in addition to having a very low carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) footprint [27,31,32].…”