Estimation of Carbon Footprint of Residential Building in Warm Humid Climate of India through BIM

Abstract

In recent years Asian Nations showed concern over the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of their civil infrastructure. This study presents a contextual investigation of a residential apartment complex in the territory of the southern part of India. The LCA is performed through Building Information Modelling (BIM) software embedded with Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) of materials utilized in construction, transportation of materials and operational energy use throughout the building lifecycle. The results of the study illustrate that cement is the material that most contributes to carbon emissions among the other materials looked at in this study. The operational stage contributed the highest amount of carbon emissions. This study emphasizes variation in the LCA results based on the selection of a combination of definite software-database combinations and manual-database computations used. For this, three LCA databases were adopted (GaBi database and ecoinvent databases through One Click LCA software), and the ICE database was used for manual calculations. The ICE database showed realistic value comparing the GaBi and ecoinvent databases. The findings of this study are valuable for the policymakers and practitioners to accomplish optimization of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions over the building life cycle.

Environmental Impact and Carbon Footprint Assessment of Sustainable Buildings: An Experimental Investigation

“…If the transporting distance is long, the emission will be higher. In this case study, the transporting distance is around 40 km from the site where there are no other options to reduce this distance as the building is located inside the city premises [31]. Many materials are ordered in bulk with large suppliers to reduce the material cost like filler gravel soil (basement fillers), coarse aggregate, fine aggregate, steel, cement, and bricks which are the important materials transported a long distance from sources about 40 km.…”

Building Information Modeling (BIM) Driven Carbon Emission Reduction Research: A 14-Year Bibliometric Analysis

“…The choice of building material has a significant impact on the building performance [49]. Concrete and its main material, cement, are the main building materials in the world, but the production of cement produces large amounts of CO 2 , which is not conducive to sustainable development in the construction industry [50][51][52]. With the development of new technologies and the invention of new materials, there are opportunities to reduce the carbon emissions from cement [53,54].…”

Traffic Road Emission Estimation Through Visual Programming Algorithms and Building Information Models: A Case Study

“…Despite the advanced details presented by this platform, its emission estimation model was focused on the fabrication stage and cannot be applied to other life cycle phases. (9) Kurian et al [36] presented an integrated platform to develop life cycle assessments combining BIM models and the environmental product declarations of materials used in construction, including their transport and estimation of the operational energy of the equipment. This platform was applied to a contextual investigation of a residential complex located in South India to determine the carbon footprint of residential buildings.…”

“…Estimation of the carbon footprint during the life cycle of materials manufacturing [36] The information in Table 1 shows that the use of BIM in emission estimation processes has focused primarily on building projects. Its limited use for road projects has mainly been in the carbon footprint of the construction phases rather than the operational carbon footprint.…”