Industrial or Traditional Bamboo Construction? Comparative Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Bamboo-Based Buildings

Edwin Zea Escamilla,Hector Archilla,Guillaume Habert,Juan Correal Daza,Juan Echeverry Fernández,David Trujillo

doi:10.3390/su10093096

Abstract

The past five decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in population. This has led to an ever-growing housing demand. It has been proposed that the use of bio-based materials, and specifically bamboo, can help alleviate the housing demand in a sustainable manner. The present paper aims to assess the environmental impact caused by using four different construction materials (bamboo, brick, concrete hollow block, and engineered bamboo) in buildings. A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) was carried out to measure the environmental impact of the different construction materials in the construction of single and multi-storey buildings. The LCA considered the extraction, production, transport, and use of the construction materials. The IPCC2013 evaluation method from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC2013 was used for the calculations of CO2 emissions. The assessment was geographically located in Colombia, South America, and estimates the transport distances of the construction materials. The results show that transportation and reinforcing materials significantly contribute to the environmental impact, whereas the engineered bamboo construction system has the lowest environmental impact. The adoption of bamboo-based construction systems has a significant potential to support the regenerative development of regions where they could be used and might lead to long-lasting improvements to economies, environments, and livelihoods.

Highlights

In 2018, the global human population reached 7.6 billion [1], with more than 54% living in urban areas [2]
The steady growth of these figures hinders the achievement of the goals and targets recently agreed by governments and the United Nation (UN)’s Sustainable Development Goals [3], and in particular, the goals related to the provision of dignified, resilient, and sustainable housing for all [4]
The present study aims to assess the environmental impact from the use of four construction materials in buildings and determine the potential benefits—in terms of CO2 savings—from the use of traditional or bamboo-based construction systems in single and multi-storey buildings

Summary

Introduction

In 2018, the global human population reached 7.6 billion [1], with more than 54% living in urban areas [2]. The use of glue-laminated bamboo enables higher levels of industrialization and the standardization of bamboo-based construction materials, making their properties more reliable, and their adoption much simpler in terms of design and construction [21,25,26,27,28,29] This potentiates an increase in the number of storeys that can be built, leading to buildings that are better suited to a dense urban context. In order to maximize its potential, an LCA should be conducted at the early building-design stages when it is still possible to make substantial changes to the design [42,46] This is the period when the least amount of information is available, and comes at the cost of higher uncertainties regarding the construction materials to be used, their production efficiency, and transportation logistics [47,48]. Timber has been excluded from the list of materials to be considered, because its use is not currently common or widespread in Colombia; some commercial reforestation projects do exist, they are not yet making a significant impact in the construction market

Materials and Methods

Results

Life Cycle Impact Analysis

Contribution to Environmental Impact