Abstract
The building industry is currently strengthening the building life cycle assessment (LCA) criteria of the green building certification system to encourage carbon emission reduction. However, the voluntary approach of the LCA criteria does not provide sufficient incentive to effectively drive green building construction. Furthermore, additional costs associated with green building construction are not given enough weightage, thus hampering the incorporation of green building technologies. This study developed a Green Building Index (GBI) Certification System to effectively reduce carbon emissions in South Korea’s building industry. Consequently, the assessment areas for green buildings were divided into a carbon emission index, a building habitability index, and a carbon economic index, and assessment methods were suggested for each area. In addition, eco-efficiency, which represents an environmental value, was incorporated into the three indices from the perspective of green building certification and used to estimate a GBI that represents overall building sustainability. This GBI was then integrated into an overall GBI Certification System, and a case study was used to evaluate its applicability. The results indicate the validity of the proposed GBI Certification System, which promotes voluntary carbon emission reduction by evaluating cost effectiveness based on life cycle carbon emissions and carbon economic efficiency.
Highlights
Dramatic population growth and rapid, technology-based industrial development that began at the end of the 20th century have resulted in a host of international environmental issues, global warming being at the forefront [1,2]
Carbon emissions associated with the construction of reference buildings were obtained by calculating the average carbon emissions per unit area for 32 apartment buildings previously constructed in South Korea using their respective design statements
Scores given to Apartment Building A by the conventional Green Standard for Energy and Environmental Design (G-SEED) method were assigned for the corresponding assessment sub-criteria, and scores for newly added assessment sub-criteria were determined using construction drawings and recorded data for Apartment Building A according to the certification criteria for each particular sub-criterion
Summary
Dramatic population growth and rapid, technology-based industrial development that began at the end of the 20th century have resulted in a host of international environmental issues, global warming being at the forefront [1,2]. Industries are employing a variety of strategies to reduce carbon emissions, one of the main drivers of global warming [3,4,5]. As part of a strategy designed to encourage green building construction, the building industry is currently in the process of strengthening the certification criteria for building life cycle assessment (LCA) in conjunction with the development of a green building certification system [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. The building LCA criteria quantitatively evaluate potential carbon emissions and other environmental impacts during a building’s entire life cycle [17,18,19,20]. These systems continually strengthen building LCA criteria by revising green building criteria, changing the LCA from an optional item to a core consideration [21,22,23,24,25,26]
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