Carbon emission scenario of conventional buildings

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a very familiar methodology to measure the environmental effects of any products where all the process associated with the products from cradle to grave was analyzed and the possible emission to environment can be identified. In this study we applied LCA on three traditionally constructed reinforced concrete buildings (one five storied residential building, one three storied office building and one three storied educational building) where no environmental issues were considered during design and construction period. The aim of this research is to evaluate and compare energy consumption and carbon emissions of three different types of buildings from their materialization stage to the end-of-life stage. This paper also describes the step-by-step process of quantifying the overall carbon emission from a building systematically. There is an overview of how emission varies according to buildings material, construction process and objective of buildings. The result shows that the operational phase is mainly responsible for maximum carbon emission due to maximum energy consumption among three phases of life cycle assessment. However, it is also found from the study that the materialization and operation stages together contribute more than 97% of total emissions. Since a huge amount of operational energy is required for commercial building compare to other two buildings, it consumes energy comparatively higher than residential and educational building which results in 13.6% more emission than residential building and 19% more than educational building.