Environmental Impact Assessment of Buildings with Steel-Intensive Façade Systems – A Case Study

Abstract

AbstractGlobal concerns about environmental sustainability have escalated in the last three decades, forcing industries to critically examine their practices and their contribution to the overall ecological footprint. The construction sector has become a significant contributor to environmental deterioration due to its extensive energy consumption, raw material extraction, and waste generation. One of the ways to reduce the environmental impact of the construction sector is to decrease the embodied carbon footprint of buildings using the three R approaches – reduce, reuse, recycle and by using renewable construction materials. The paper focusses on the evaluation of the behaviour of steel-intensive façade systems from an environmental impact perspective. The research presented in the paper shows a comparative Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of industrial buildings that have envelopes consisting of liner tray cladding systems and sandwich panel cladding systems. The results of this comparison show that when different envelope solutions are considered, the highest potential benefits (8–25% higher) occur for structures that have liner tray cladding systems and the highest loads (11–19% higher) appear for structures that have sandwich panel cladding systems. Moreover, the potential for repeated reuse in the case of claddings based on steel liner trays is superior to the potential for repeated reuse of sandwich panels, helping to reduce the environmental impact of the cladding system even after its second life cycle.