A Life Cycle Analysis Approach for Embodied Carbon for a Residential Building
The rapid urbanization process has led to a dramatic increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions in the world, which has accelerated the trend of global warming significantly. Building sector is one of the greatest contributors to that increase. I
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A Life Cycle Analysis Approach for Embodied Carbon for a Residential Building Shengping Li, Hang Yan, Jindao Chen and Liyin Shen
Abstract The rapid urbanization process has led to a dramatic increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions in the world, which has accelerated the trend of global warming significantly. Building sector is one of the greatest contributors to that increase. In this paper, a life cycle inventory analysis model has been formulated to calculate the embodied carbon during the life cycle for a residential building. The life cycle is divided into five stages, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and demolition & disposal. A case study selected in Chongqing is used to demonstrate the application of the method. The results show that materials production stage contributes the most of the embodied carbon (90.92 %) for a residential building, and those materials contribute mostly to the embodied carbon, including concrete (36.3 %), steel (24.1 %), brick (16.6 %), cement (13.4 %) and others (9.6 %). From the perspective of subsystem to a building, structure is the largest contributor to the total embodied carbon to the building, accounting for 78.4 %. The results reveal the quantity of embodied carbon in different stages, materials and subsystems of buildings, which can help identify the optimal solution to reduce the quantity of embodied carbon in buildings and improve the environment performance. Keywords Life cycle assessment Inventory analysis
Embodied carbon
Residential building
S. Li H. Yan J. Chen (&) L. Shen School of Construction Management and Real Estate, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China e-mail: [email protected] S. Li H. Yan J. Chen L. Shen International Research Centre for Sustainable Built Environment, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 Y. Wu et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0855-9_104
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Introduction
Energy consumption and carbon emissions experience a noticeable upward trend due to the rapid urbanization process [1]. Global warming has become more and more serious and attracted increasing attention. Building sector is one of the main energy consumers and carbon emitters, which contributes largely to global warming. According to the report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), building sector consumed about 32 % of the global energy sources and emitted about 19 % of the global greenhouse gases [2]. China, the largest carbon emitter in the world, has been predicted that it would build 40 billion square meters of buildings in the next twenty years, equivalent to 85 % of the gross urban and rural residential buildings areas in 2012 [3], which will cause a large increase in carbon emissions. Life cycle carbon emissions of buildings mainly incorporate embodied carbon and operational carbon. Embodied carbon ref
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