The Australian industrial ecology virtual laboratory and multi-scale assessment of buildings and construction

Abstract

As global population and urbanization increase, so do the direct and indirect environmental impacts of construction around the world. Low-impact products, buildings, precincts and cities are needed to mitigate the effects of building construction and use. Analysis of embodied energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across these scales is becoming more important to support this direction. The calculation of embodied impacts requires rigorous, flexible and comprehensive assessment tools. Firstly, we present the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) as one such tool discussing its structure, function and wide scope of application. Secondly, we demonstrate its potential high level of resolution in a case study: assessing embodied GHG emissions in an aluminium-framed window by combining productspecific life-cycle inventory data. The input-output analysis at the core of the IELab is mathematically comprehensive in the assessment of direct and indirect impacts and the tool can be applied at a range of scales from building component, to precincts and cities, or to the entire construction industry. IELab uses a flexible formalism that enables consistent harmonisation of diverse datasets and tractable updating of input data. The emissions and energy database supporting IELab has detailed data, aligning with economic accounts and data on labour, water, materials and waste that enrich assessment across other dimensions of sustainability. IELab is a comprehensive, flexible and robust assessment tool well positioned to respond to the challenge of assessing and aiding the design of a low-impact built environment.

Barriers to “green operation” of commercial office buildings

“…(Levitt, 2013, p. 7) Operations and maintenance activities contribute significantly to costs accrued during the building's whole life cycle -such costs being five to seven times higher than the building's initial construction cost (Hosseini et al, 2018). Buildings, at a global scale, are responsible for 30-40 per cent of GHG emissions and close to 48 per cent of energy and natural resources consumption (Baynes et al, 2018). For Australia, buildings account for almost 20 per cent of the nation's annual energy consumption and produce 23 per cent of the GHG (Robati et al, 2018); the most substantial part of the climate-change impacts are estimated to be caused by buildings during their operating phase (Junnila, 2004;Nielsen et al, 2016).…”

Life cycle environmental impact assessment of contemporary and traditional housing in Palestine

“…[16,17]), or hybrid analysis (e.g. [18,19]). There are considerable methodological variations in how the method is applied across industry [20], and it is still debated which approach yields the best results [21,22].…”

Consequences of long-term infrastructure decisions—the case of self-healing roads and their CO2 emissions

“…The long-term input-output table time series {T, V, Y, Q} was constructed in the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) [59][60][61], a collaborative research platform that use high-performance computation to integrate a large number of data sources supplied by multiple users according to a standardised and automated compilation pipeline [62]. We estimated the longest time series ever constructed in the Australian IELab.…”