Examination of Bearing Walls Regarding Their Environmental Performance

Abstract

A comprehensive understanding of the environmental impacts of buildings is not possible without knowledge of the technical and environmental properties of the materials that are used for their construction. This paper evaluates the environmental impacts of 156 material variations of conventional compositions of external bearing walls, which represent a significant part of a building’s envelope. Environmental (embodied energy, global warming potential, effects to human health, damage to ecosystems, and resources availability) and technical (surface temperature, number of layers, thickness, and weight) parameters are investigated for structures with similar heat transfer coefficients (U = 0.21–0.22 W/(m2·K)). Based on a multi-criteria analysis, an optimal material composition, consisting of aerated concrete with graphite polystyrene, was identified. By analyzing the costs of the best material compositions, it is observed that constructions with environmental benefits do not result in an increase in the cost of the construction. On the contrary, at present, they represent an approximately 10% cheaper solution.

Comparison of Material-Technical Solution of Masonry Family House by Two Different Calculating LCA Approaches

“…The choice of categories and indicators on an individual basis and depends on the scope and objectives of the evaluation is made. Mainly, the following indicators are used to compare the environmental impacts of building materials: Climate Change caused by gases having Global Warming Potential (GWP measuring CO2-equivalents (CO2-eq), acidification potential (AP) is measuring SO2-equivalents (SO2-eq) and primary energy (PEI) (MJ) representing the amount of non-renewable energy for the production of building materials [16,17].…”