Building Life Cycle Assessment to Evaluate Environment Sustainability of Residential Buildings in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The built environment consumes significant amounts of natural resources and energy while being responsible for emitting huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and thereby to become as one of the main contributors for climate change. Therefore, identifying the nvironmental hotspots from the built environment has become important considering the entire life cycle of the building i.e. cradle-to-gate. Hence the importance of using Building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool for evaluating environmental impacts related to the building sector is globally recognized. This paper presents an LCA for a case study of a typical single floor residential building located in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The system boundary of this study is considered as cradle-to-gate. The LCA model is developed using SimaPro 8.5.0. software tool. The results obtained from this LCA study highlighted that building walls as the most significant building component in terms of negative environmental impacts. Hence, more attention needs to be given to external and internal wall components to reduce negative environmental impacts. For further studies, it is recommended to measure the potential to reduce environmental impacts with the use of alternative construction materials and alternative construction practices for building walls in Sri Lanka.