The Embodied Impact of Existing Building Stock

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Ming Hu
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Building Stock ◽  
Existing Building ◽  
Potential Analysis ◽  
Research Activities

This chapter provides the reader with a better understanding of the life cycle environmental impacts, with a focus on the embodied impact of existing building stock. A systematic literature review is conducted to paint a clear picture of the current research activities and findings. The major components of embodied impact and parameters influencing the embodied impact are outlined and explained. Lastly, this chapter discusses the major barriers for the embodied impact assessment, and a potential analysis framework is proposed at the end.

scholarly journals Life-Cycle Assessment of a Rural Terraced House: A Struggle with Sustainability of Building Renovations

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 2472
Author(s):  
Karel Struhala ◽  
Milan Ostrý
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle Assessment ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Energy Sources ◽  
Construction Sector ◽  
Building Stock ◽  
Existing Building ◽  
New Construction ◽  
Consumption Energy

Contemporary research stresses the need to reduce mankind’s environmental impacts and achieve sustainability. One of the keys to this is the construction sector. New buildings have to comply with strict limits regarding resource consumption (energy, water use, etc.). However, they make up only a fraction of the existing building stock. Renovations of existing buildings are therefore essential for the reduction of the environmental impacts in the construction sector. This paper illustrates the situation using a case study of a rural terraced house in a village near Brno, Czech Republic. It compares the life-cycle assessment (LCA) of the original house and its proposed renovation as well as demolition followed by new construction. The LCA covers both the initial embodied environmental impacts (EEIs) and the 60-year operation of the house with several variants of energy sources. The results show that the proposed renovation would reduce overall environmental impacts (OEIs) of the house by up to 90% and the demolition and new construction by up to 93% depending on the selected energy sources. As such, the results confirm the importance of renovations and the installation of environmentally-friendly energy sources for achieving sustainability in the construction sector. They also show the desirability of the replacement of inefficient old buildings by new construction in specific cases.

scholarly journals A Life Cycle Framework for the Identification of Optimal Building Renovation Strategies Considering Economic and Environmental Impacts

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 10221
Author(s):  
Martina Caruso ◽  
Rui Pinho ◽  
Federica Bianchi ◽  
Francesco Cavalieri ◽  
Maria Teresa Lemmo
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Service Life ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Seismic Vulnerability ◽  
Resource Depletion ◽  
Renewable Resource ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Building Stock ◽  
Existing Building

It is well-known that the existing building stock is responsible for non-renewable resource depletion, energy and material consumption, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Life cycle analysis (LCA) procedures have thus been developed, in recent years, to assess the environmental impact of construction and operational phases through the entire building life cycle. Furthermore, the economic, environmental, and social consequences of recent natural disasters have encouraged the additional integration of hazard-induced impacts into common LCA procedures for buildings. Buildings are however expected to provide the population with safe living and working conditions, even when hit by different types of hazards during their service life, such as earthquakes. Hence, next-generation LCA procedures should include not only hazard-induced impacts, but also the contribution of potential retrofitting strategies that may alter the structural and energy performances of buildings throughout their remaining service life. This study presents a life cycle framework that accounts for the contributions of initial construction, operational energy consumption, earthquake-induced damage repair activities, potential retrofitting interventions, and demolition (considering also its associated potential material recycling), in terms of both monetary costs and environmental impacts. The proposed methodology can be used to undertake cost-benefit analyses aimed at identifying building renovation strategies that lead to an optimal balance, considering both economic and environmental impacts, between reduction of seismic vulnerability and increase of energy efficiency of a building, depending on the climatic conditions and the seismic hazard at the site of interest.

scholarly journals Optimal Renovation Strategies through Life-Cycle Analysis in a Pilot Building Located in a Mild Mediterranean Climate

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1423
Author(s):  
José Manuel Salmerón Lissen ◽  
Cristina Isabel Jareño Escudero ◽  
Francisco José Sánchez de la Flor ◽  
Miriam Navarro Escudero ◽  
Theoni Karlessi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Life Cycle Cost ◽  
Mediterranean Climate ◽  
Building Envelope ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Hot Water ◽  
Optimal Solutions ◽  
Building Stock ◽  
Existing Building ◽  
The Cost

The 2030 climate and energy framework includes EU-wide targets and policy objectives for the period 2021–2030 of (1) at least 55% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (from 1990 levels); (2) at least 32% share for renewable energy; and (3) at least 32.5% improvement in energy efficiency. In this context, the methodology of the cost-optimal level from the life-cycle cost approach has been applied to calculate the cost of renovating the existing building stock in Europe. The aim of this research is to analyze a pilot building using the cost-optimal methodology to determine the renovation measures that lead to the lowest life-cycle cost during the estimated economic life of the building. The case under study is an apartment building located in a mild Mediterranean climate (Castellon, SP). A package of 12 optimal solutions has been obtained to show the importance of the choice of the elements and systems for renovating building envelopes and how energy and economic aspects influence this choice. Simulations have shown that these packages of optimal solutions (different configurations for the building envelope, thermal bridges, airtightness and ventilation, and domestic hot water production systems) can provide savings in the primary energy consumption of up to 60%.

scholarly journals Sustainability Requirements of Digital Twin-Based Systems: A Meta Systematic Literature Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5519
Author(s):  
Rui Carvalho ◽  
Alberto Rodrigues da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Product Life Cycle ◽  
Data Communication ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Digital Twin ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Reducing Costs

Sustainable development was defined by the UN in 1987 as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and this is a core concept in this paper. This work acknowledges the three dimensions of sustainability, i.e., economic, social, and environmental, but its focus is on this last one. A digital twin (DT) is frequently described as a physical entity with a virtual counterpart, and the data, connections between the two, implying the existence of connectors and blocks for efficient and effective data communication. This paper provides a meta systematic literature review (SLR) (i.e., an SLR of SLRs) regarding the sustainability requirements of DT-based systems. Numerous papers on the subject of DT were also selected because they cited the analyzed SLRs and were considered relevant to the purposes of this research. From the selection and analysis of 29 papers, several limitations and challenges were identified: the perceived benefits of DTs are not clearly understood; DTs across the product life cycle or the DT life cycle are not sufficiently studied; it is not clear how DTs can contribute to reducing costs or supporting decision-making; technical implementation of DTs must be improved and better integrated in the context of the IoT; the level of fidelity of DTs is not entirely evaluated in terms of their parameters, accuracy, and level of abstraction; and the ownership of data stored within DTs should be better understood. Furthermore, from our research, it was not possible to find a paper discussing DTs only in regard to environmental sustainability.

scholarly journals Knowledge Governance: Building a Conceptual Framework

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-92
Author(s):  
Isabel Pinho ◽  
Cláudia Pinho ◽  
António Pedro Costa
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Systematic Literature Review ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Analysis Framework ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Structured Analysis ◽  
Knowledge Governance ◽  
Core Documents

This exploratory systematic literature review is a starting point for a deep literature review on “Knowledge Governance” (KGOV) topic. The aim is to have a quick picture about KGOV; specifically trying to identify the seminal, core and relevant documents. We also seek to know the contexts of these studies, as well as on what ontological levels and activities they refer to. The principal results are: a) the identification of the structure of the topic, by retrieving the main seminal articles and the most cited (core documents) and b) the building of a structured analysis framework. This framework will be used to perform a deep literature review that aim to develop an integrated and holist conceptual model on Knowledge Governance. Major conclusions are related to clues for future research on this topic.

Evaluating the Environmental Impact Score of a Residential Building Using Life Cycle Assessment

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-159
Author(s):  
Manish Sakhlecha ◽  
Samir Bajpai ◽  
Rajesh Kumar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle Assessment ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Residential Building ◽  
Resource Depletion ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Growing Economy

Buildings consume major amount of energy as well as natural resources leading to negative environmental impacts like resource depletion and pollution. The current task for the construction sector is to develop an evaluation tool for rating of buildings based on their environmental impacts. There are various assessment tools and models developed by different agencies in different countries to evaluate building's effect on environment. Although these tools have been successfully used and implemented in the respective regions of their origin, the problems of application occur, especially during regional adaptation in other countries due to peculiarities associated with the specific geographic location, climatic conditions, construction methods and materials. India is a rapidly growing economy with exponential increase in housing sector. Impact assessment model for a residential building has been developed based on life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. The life cycle impact assessment score was obtained for a sample house considering fifteen combinations of materials paired with 100% thermal electricity and 70%-30% thermal-solar combination, applying normalization and weighting to the LCA results. The LCA score of portland slag cement with burnt clay red brick and 70%-30% thermal-solar combination (PSC+TS+RB) was found to have the best score and ordinary Portland cement with flyash brick and 100% thermal power (OPC+T+FAB) had the worst score, showing the scope for further improvement in LCA model to include positive scores for substitution of natural resources with industrial waste otherwise polluting the environment.

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