Carbon emissions in the life cycle of urban building system in China—A case study of residential buildings

Abstract

Urban building system assumes significant environmental and ecological implications in terms of a contribution of emissions of CO 2 and other greenhouse gases. In order to understand the roles of urban building system in the global and regional climate changes, we set up an integrated model to analyze the carbon emissions of urban building system during its life cycle in this paper, which is called LCCE Model. The further analysis is made to examine the sources of CO 2 emissions and the life cycle characteristics of typical architectural structures as masonry-concrete and steel-concrete. We first identified four major sources of CO 2 emissions during the whole life cycle of urban building system, which are industrial process emissions, energy consumption emissions, fugitive emissions and land footprint emissions. Given an assumption of a building life cycle of 50 years, we took urban residential buildings as an example and calculated CO 2 emissions in the main five phases of an overall life cycle of a residential building system, including constructive materials preparation, building construction and reformation, building operation, building demolition as well as wastes treatment and recycling. A comparison was made to examine the differences of CO 2 emissions among buildings with two typical architectural structures as masonry-concrete and steel-concrete. The results show that the latter produces less CO 2 emission than the former per unit area. Specifically, the amount of CO 2 emission is 329.61 t for masonry-concrete buildings and 315.79 t for steel-concrete buildings per 100 m 2. Most emissions come from energy consumption and land footprint, accounting for 78–83% and 13–20% of the total emissions respectively. According to our LCCE model, there is a great potential of reducing carbon emissions in urban building system. The key to reduce carbon emissions during the life cycle of urban buildings is directed to building wastes recycling, improvement of consumption patterns of energy and materials, preferential use of buildings with a moderate floor area ratio and effective utilization of natural energy and ecologically friendly building materials according to the characteristics of local urban development.