Life Cycle Assessment in Building: A Case Study on the Energy and Emissions Impact Related to the Choice of Housing Typologies and Construction Process in Spain

Abstract

Abstract:While there exists an international trend to develop zero or near zero emissions building solutions by 2020, and European governments continuously update their building regulations to optimize the building envelope and energy systems to achieve this during the building use stage, at least in Spain the building regulations do not take into account the impact of emissions resulting from urbanization and construction activities prior to building use. This research studies in detail the entire emissions balance (and how it may be related to energy efficiency) in a newly built residential cluster project in Mancha Real (Jaén, Spain), and influences due to the choice of different urban typologies. For comparison, terraced housing and low-density, four-floor, multi-family housing alternatives have been studied. The present work assessed the life cycle of the building with the help of commercial software (CYPE), and the energy efficiency and emissions according to the legal regulations in Spain with the official software LIDER and CALENER VYP. After a careful choice of building and systems alternatives and their comparison, the study concludes that the major emissions impact and energy costs of urbanization and building activity occurs during construction, while later savings due to reductions in building use emissions are very modest in comparison. Therefore, deeper analysis is suggested to improve the efficiency of the construction process for a significantly reduced emission footprint on the urban environment.

Reduction Strategies for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from High-Speed Railway Station Buildings in a Cold Climate Zone of China

“…The indoor illuminance of the waiting room is controlled to be 200 lux and the power density is 8 W/m 2 . Sustainability 2020, 12…”

“…Sustainability 2020, 12,1704 2 of 23 district heating) among the different building categories. The most important reason is that the proportion of large-scale or large space public buildings in the building sector-for instance, transportation buildings-has been rising rapidly [4].…”

“…As a major consumer of societal energy and national resources, it is necessary to conduct evaluative research on HSRS buildings in the scope of embodied GHG emissions. Several studies have focused on the energy consumption and carbon emissions from multiple building typologies internationally, including residential, office, school, and hotel buildings in China [8,9], Norway [10,11], Spain [12] and the United Kingdom [13]. More attention should be paid to the environmental performance of HSRS buildings, which also needs to be drastically improved.…”

Getting Environmental Information from Construction Cost Databases: Applications in Brazilian Courses and Environmental Assessment

“…In the second case, environmental studies use the structure of the unit compositions to identify the activities involved and to analyze the process flow (e.g., inputs/outputs, mass/energy). Among the themes in this group, the evaluation of the sustainability of the materials used [44,45], the comparison of construction systems and the proposition of more sustainable practices [49,50] as well as pollution emission and energy efficiency [11,15,51] can be considered.…”

A Quantitative Method for Prediction of Environmental Aspects in Construction Sites of Residential Buildings

“…In the construction market, there are also databases of sector organizations such as the Civil Construction and Public Works Industry Association of Portugal and those for private sectors such as CYPE Prices Generator maintained [82] which bring together data from 27 countries with languages of Latin origin. Beyond being used in the budget, CYPE Prices generator has also been adopted as an auxiliary tool to estimate the use of resources in different studies on environmental issues such as life cycle analysis and rehabilitation [35,83,84].…”