Abstract
The construction industry is responsible for 40–45% of primary energy consumption in Europe. Therefore, it is essential to find new materials with a lower environmental impact to achieve sustainable buildings. The objective of this study was to carry out the life cycle analysis (LCA) to evaluate the environmental impacts of baked clay bricks incorporating organic waste. The scope of this comparative study of LCA covers cradle to gate and involves the extraction of clay and organic waste from the brick, transport, crushing, modelling, drying and cooking. Local sustainability within a circular economy strategy is used as a laboratory test. The energy used during the cooking process of the bricks modified with organic waste, the gas emission concentrate and the emission factors are quantified experimentally in the laboratory. Potential environmental impacts are analysed and compared using the ReCiPe midpoint LCA method using SimaPro 8.0.5.13. These results achieved from this method are compared with those obtained with a second method—Impact 2002+ v2.12. The results of LCA show that the incorporation of organic waste in bricks is favourable from an environmental point of view and is a promising alternative approach in terms of environmental impacts, as it leads to a decrease of 15–20% in all the impact categories studied. Therefore, the suitability of the use of organic additives in clay bricks was confirmed, as this addition was shown to improve their efficiency and sustainability, thus reducing the environmental impact.
Highlights
Building and road construction is responsible for the consumption of almost half of the raw materials and energy throughout the planet [1]
life cycle analysis (LCA) is an adequate methodology to determine the environmental impact that occurs throughout the life cycle of products, services or processes
The LCA methodology allows the determination of the environmental impact of the processes, products or systems analysed in different ways
Summary
Building and road construction is responsible for the consumption of almost half of the raw materials and energy throughout the planet [1]. In order to reduce the associated greenhouse gas emissions and resulting impact on the climate, it is necessary to use environmentally sustainable building materials [2,3]. The LCA model is currently being applied in numerous studies, such as one by Tsinghua University that aims to calculate the life-cycle fossil energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in China [24]. These studies promote that it is necessary to evaluate the environmental impact of construction materials using the LCA technique. The objective of this research is to apply the LCA methodology to new samples of clay with the incorporation of biomass in order to determine new construction materials from the viewpoints of sustainability [30,31]
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