Abstract
Construction is a crucial sector in terms of worldwide environmental impacts. Building material production along with transport and demolition are no exception, because in the last decades, they have constantly increased their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Actions and initiatives are therefore important to tackle the relationship between buildings and climate change. Particularly, it is necessary to develop Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools useful to calculate the environmental impact of buildings and to make them accessible to designers and stakeholders acting in the building sector. The article aims to contribute to the international debate about environmental assessment indicators for buildings and the simplified LCA based tools. The Embodied Energy (EE) and the Embodied Carbon (EC) have been investigated. The former, related to primary energy content; the latter, associated with the equivalent carbon dioxide emissions. EE and EC have been used as indicators for the development of a calculation tool named EURECA, for assessing the environmental impact of the building over its life cycle, as defined by the EN 15978:2011 standard. The Solar Decathlon Latin America and Caribbean’s house designed and built by an international academic team has been an opportunity to check the indicators and the tool’s effectiveness.
Highlights
The global construction industry is in full development
In a background, such as the one just outlined, the paper encourages the use of Embodied Energy (EE) and Embodied Carbon (EC) as building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicators; illustrating the outcomes of a research project that led to the development
Its high impact is due to the fact that PVC was used as the frame of the windows, which account for 80% of the total vertical surface; a critical issue that was identified during the early design stage and led the team to consider alternative options; it was decided not to replace PVC because, if compared to wood or aluminium–wood window frames, it was the lightest technology and easier to install in the construction site
Summary
The global construction industry is in full development. Fatih Birol, Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the foreword to the Global Status Report 2017, “Towards a zero-emission, efficient, and resilient buildings and construction sector”, describes how over 230 billion square meters of new buildings are expected to be built over the 40 years [1]. Several publications [3,4,5] confirmed the importance of investigating the relationships between energy and environmental impacts beyond their building use, including other stages, such as production, construction, and end-of-life as well as the relevance of studying the CO2 emissions associated with building processes [6,7]. In a background, such as the one just outlined, the paper encourages the use of Embodied Energy (EE) and Embodied Carbon (EC) as building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicators; illustrating the outcomes of a research project that led to the development. The EE and EC of the production, construction, and end-of-life stages have been correlated with the use of stage impacts to assess the mutual ratios
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