Forest-based bioproducts used for construction and its impact on the environmental performance of a building in the whole life cycle

Abstract

Because of the increasing emissions of various pollutants, rapidly growing energy demands, and possible global warming consequences, renewable and nature friendly construction materials are gaining importance. Climate change due to global warming, variations in oil prices and environmental threats have led to significant demand for the wood bio and bio-based products, where construction products represent a significant volume. Construction industry has significant environmental, social and economic impacts on the society. The wood buildings require much lower process energy and result in lower carbon emissions than the buildings of other materials such as brick, aluminium, steel and concrete. If a shift is made towards greater use of wood in buildings, the low fossil fuel requirement for manufacturing wood compared with other materials is much more significant in the long term than the carbon stored in the wood building products. To compare the environmental performance of a building in the whole life cycle, the carbon footprint of 15 insulation materials was calculated. The obtained values were compared to the actual effect of the respective thermal insulation. The transparency of the comparison was achieved by taking into account the specific weight of each material, as well as differences in their thermal conductivity (λ). Moreover, a study of environmental neutrality of different types of insulation materials is presented. For the thermal insulation materials with the lowest environmental impact, the environmental neutrality is reached in only 0.57 heating season and in 7.89 heating seasons for the insulation with the highest environmental impact.