Role of lightweight materials of construction on carbon dioxide emission of a reinforced concrete building

Abstract

Environmental concerns are a big threat to most of the countries in the world, especially with the growing size of infrastructure. The present study is an attempt to assess the ecological imbalance, environmental impacts to address the major environment concerns in the construction of residential buildings using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool. SimaPro 8.4, was used to assess and verify the overall performance of the project. The CO2 emission due to the manufacturing of building materials was 18,629 tons which contributed to 90% of the total indirect emissions and the machinery used during construction considered as direct emission was 3485.01 tons. Comparing to alternate databases, the percentage difference in the value of CO2 emissions when an alternate database was used, was found to be 27%. For masonry, the conventional brick masonry ranked highest in terms of CO2 emissions while sand lime masonry which is lightweight in nature as lowest. The case study of a building constructed with reinforced cement concrete as structural elements was chosen to apply the concepts of LCA and to compare the results with alternative materials.