Research

Tracing the environmental impact origin within the existing build-ing portfolio of prevailing building typologies : Paper

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Abstract

As circular economy (CE) is becoming a growing focus in the building industry due to the industries large resource consumption, waste production and environmental impacts a better understanding of buildings material composition, resource consumption and resulting environmental performance becomes increasingly important in order to support the transition towards CE. The research presented here is a stepping stone in order to investigating the existing building portfolio and the conducted analysis. It is used to get further information on what is included and where there is lack of information, in order to understand what is missing or what is needed to develop CE design strategies. Although, life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly used by the industry to assess these aspects, the lack of a systematic analytical approach as well as the high building complexity and diversity between buildings limits generalised knowledge from these studies. However, it is assumed that there are certain commonalities between the existing portfolio of prevailing building typologies which can be deducted. The study at hand is a part of a larger research project that aims at developing industry specific tools to support designers and decision makers select CE design strategies that improve the environmental performance and resource consumption of buildings. On the basis of a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of whole building LCAs the paper at hand aims at tracing the environmental impact origin within the existing building portfolio of prevailing building typologies. To identify potentially important building parameters relevant to the resulting environmental impact performance and resource consumption of different building typologies. Based on 39 building LCA case studies that matched the specific inclusion and exclusion criteria of the SLR a focus on global warming and climate change was detected. It was found that even though buildings have different characteristics (size, typology, storeys, reference study period and location), for most of the buildings’ environmental impacts were predominantly related to the production of structurally important concrete components e.g. the structural frame, the external envelope, floor slabs and walls. To point towards which CE design strategies should be used to improve the environmental performance of buildings; the environmental information from the studies was insufficient due to lack of detailed information.