Assessment of building materials in environmental context

Abstract

Nowadays, the environmental impacts of operational stage of buildings, which are the most important from their life cycle perspective, can be relatively well assessed, i.e. operational energy and water consumption or production of emission. The second biggest environmental impacts of buildings comes from their production stage - manufacture of building materials. Although it is not a negligible impact, it is usually not taken into account during the design process of buildings. One of the main reasons is the unavailability of quality Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data of building materials needed for the assessment.This thesis deals with assessing the production stage of buildings. Its aim is to shed light on the issue of the appropriate use of already existing LCA data of building materials and to facilitate the acquisition and processing of new LCA data in any national context. The work focuses on LCA data of building materials (primary energy consumption, global warming potential, acidification potential, etc.) in terms of availability in different databases, methods of calculation, quality and possibilities of accurate use in construction practice. It examines the differences between existing data in international databases, analyzes their causes and identifies pitfalls of their use in the national context.One of the main results of the work is a guidance for the use of existing specific LCA data of building products in a national context and a methodology describing the process of new LCA data gathering in context of Czech Republic, where no national data have yet been available, i.e. creating new national database and related Czech environmental assessment tool for building elements Envimat. The work is done in accordance with international standards.Due to the large amount of specific environmental data of construction products available abroad, e.g. in France of Germany, the work focuses on the possibilities of their use as generic data in the national context, in comparison with already existing generic data. Thus, the second main output of the work was elaborated in a form of a methodology for the use of existing LCA data on building materials as generic data in a national context. The methodology is in accordance with the requirements of European standards and scientifically recognized literature and can be used in each country. The development was based on a detailed analysis and comparison of selected environmental data sets from two largest LCA databases - French INIES and Swiss Ecoinvent. A universal Generic data template was created to simplify the work of LCA practitioners with available meta data and to allow unified data quality assessment. At the final step, the methodology is validated by two case studies - one focusing on selection of the most appropriate generic data for the national context, second dealing with the assessment of a simplified building model by the generic data sets selected according to the proposed methodology.

Nowadays, the environmental impacts of operational stage of buildings, which are the most important from their life cycle perspective, can be relatively well assessed, i.e. operational energy and water consumption or production of emission. The second biggest environmental impacts of buildings comes from their production stage - manufacture of building materials. Although it is not a negligible impact, it is usually not taken into account during the design process of buildings. One of the main reasons is the unavailability of quality Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data of building materials needed for the assessment.This thesis deals with assessing the production stage of buildings. Its aim is to shed light on the issue of the appropriate use of already existing LCA data of building materials and to facilitate the acquisition and processing of new LCA data in any national context. The work focuses on LCA data of building materials (primary energy consumption, global warming potential, acidification potential, etc.) in terms of availability in different databases, methods of calculation, quality and possibilities of accurate use in construction practice. It examines the differences between existing data in international databases, analyzes their causes and identifies pitfalls of their use in the national context.One of the main results of the work is a guidance for the use of existing specific LCA data of building products in a national context and a methodology describing the process of new LCA data gathering in context of Czech Republic, where no national data have yet been available, i.e. creating new national database and related Czech environmental assessment tool for building elements Envimat. The work is done in accordance with international standards.Due to the large amount of specific environmental data of construction products available abroad, e.g. in France of Germany, the work focuses on the possibilities of their use as generic data in the national context, in comparison with already existing generic data. Thus, the second main output of the work was elaborated in a form of a methodology for the use of existing LCA data on building materials as generic data in a national context. The methodology is in accordance with the requirements of European standards and scientifically recognized literature and can be used in each country. The development was based on a detailed analysis and comparison of selected environmental data sets from two largest LCA databases - French INIES and Swiss Ecoinvent. A universal Generic data template was created to simplify the work of LCA practitioners with available meta data and to allow unified data quality assessment. At the final step, the methodology is validated by two case studies - one focusing on selection of the most appropriate generic data for the national context, second dealing with the assessment of a simplified building model by the generic data sets selected according to the proposed methodology.