Method for rapid estimation of carbon footprint involving complex building inventory data - A case study

Abstract

The process of performing carbon footprint assessment for buildings often involves the collection of vast amount of life cycle inventory data. It is not uncommon for the bill-of-material of buildings to exceed 100 items. Furthermore, the nature of the bill-of-material is a mixture of component (individual identifiable materials) and composite (mix of several materials) data, which introduces further complexities during data processing. The matching of emission factors to the appropriate activity data is a time-consuming process and therefore reliable emission results will be delayed when data gap is encountered. This paper aims to resolve the issues faced when conducting carbon footprint assessment involving complex dataset. A method is proposed for activity data screening and rapid emission estimation to enable the timely reliable estimations of the final emission results even where data gap in the emission factor exists. Further error analysis enables practitioners to focus data collection effort based on expected error of the inventory data items. Cut-off criteria may therefore be specified on this basis in order to manage data collection efforts.