Limitation of the environmental impacts of a heritage hotel building by Life Cycle Analysis (LCA)

Abstract

Today, it seems that talking about the existing traditional buildings is a somewhat elegiac vision in the face of the magnitude of the global changes that are currently taking place, yet it is a truism to repeat that without this, the city would lose its anchorage and its identity; as a result, and so that it can move at the same rhythm of the changes that are continually reshaping its physiology, it seems urgent today to reconcile energy performance with the architectural qualities of its built environment. The present work aims at reducing the pressure on the environment by intervening on a heritage hotel building located in Central Algiers through a comparative LCA with a low consumption hotel building in France, in order to reduce its generation of environmental impacts, particularly carbon dioxide, while identifying the contribution of the main sources to the overall balance and thus know which elements of this building require special attention in the effort to reduce the impacts generated for a possible renovation. This objective was achieved by a double evaluation, one energetic and the other environmental by LCA which enabled us to develop a new variant emitting 60% less CO2 while preserving the heritage qualities of our building.