Green Maintenance Approach: Low Carbon Repair Appraisal on St Paul’s Church, Melaka, Malaysia

Abstract

Sustainability commonly denotes an integration of economic, societal, and environmental domains giving rise to the concept of livable built environment. Progressively, environmental consideration in low carbon repair appraisal for heritage buildings has become increasingly critical and this paper supports this expanding area. This paper gives insight on how ‘Green Maintenance’ concept and methodology was adopted to appraise low carbon repair works for laterite stones of St Paul’s Church, located at the Historical City of Melaka, Malaysia. Subsequently, this paper also highlights the common techniques and materials for laterite stones repair. This has been achieved through quantification of embodied carbon expenditure in laterite stones repair within ‘cradle-to-site’ boundary of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), using formulaic expression and calculation procedure of ‘Green Maintenance’ model. The calculation procedures of the model were adopted to enable the evaluation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, in terms of embodied carbon expenditure, expended from laterite stones repair for selected case study. The results revealed that stone replacement is considered as the most sustainable repair technique, mainly due to its high longevity of repair and low embodied carbon expenditure, in terms of generated Environmental Maintenance Impact (EMI) of ‘Green Maintenance’ modelling. However, it may lead to a further discussion in term of philosophical context. As guidance, the EMI model relays the true value of CO2 emissions, contextualised within the longevity of repair and minimal intervention that allows low carbon repair appraisal within livable built environment domain.