Assessment on the carbon efficiency in the construction stage: a comparative study between prefabricated and conventional construction

Abstract

Construction industry is the consuming large amounts of natural resources and at the expense of a heavy environmental burden. Therefore, we need to keep a balance between creating economic benefit through construction and focusing on the influence to the environment with the aim of the value of carbon emissions maximize. The paper puts forward carbon efficiency which provides a linkage between carbon reduction and value creation of construction effectively can reflect construction efficiency. The essence of carbon efficiency is using the lowest environment output to build a construction. Through analysing two cases, result shows that carbon efficiency of prefabricated construction is higher than the conventional construction’s, which improves 25%. Besides, the measures are provided to improve the carbon efficiency of constructing. Enhancing the precast level, implementing prefabricated components standardized, optimizing site management is the main key to realize the low carbon construction.