How differentiating design strategies across building components lead to maximum reduction of adverse environmental impacts

Abstract

Purpose The building sector is responsible for substantial adverse environmental impact and vast material consumption. Eco-design of buildings is a potential mitigation strategy; however, quantitative evidence of the mitigation potential is lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to quantify the environmental consequences of applying multiple combinations of various eco-design strategies to a building, thereby providing new insights into eco-designing buildings and potential focal points to mitigate the environmental impacts of the building sector. Method A multi-step approach was used to quantify the environmental consequences of conjointly applying various eco-design strategies to a building. In this approach, combinations of the eco-design strategies were applied to eight different components of a case building, such as interior walls and floor separations. Life cycle inventories were compiled for the original building design and for when the combinations of eco-design strategies were applied. The inventories were used as input for a consequential LCA, quantifying the potential environmental impacts across 16 impact categories. The impacts were then summed up to represent the total impact of a building, resulting in almost 3 million different design scenarios, and thereby environmental impact scenarios. The results were interpreted using statistical analysis such as linear regression. Results and discussion Results show that to minimize adverse environmental impacts construction materials should be used in the following prioritized order, biotic materials, inert natural materials, inorganic materials, and finally reclaimed materials. The fact that reclaimed materials are the least favorable for impact reductions goes against the findings of previous studies. However, this is because previous studies apply attributional modeling, while this study appliesy consequential modeling. The results indicate that the impact category climate change, can be a good proxy for the overall impact reduction across categories. However, the results also show that the distribution of the impacts for the design scenarios differs greatly across the assessed impact categories, which would not have been identified if only focusing on climate change. Conclusions Noticeable impact reductions are observed when the same combination of eco-design strategies is applied to all building components; however, the greatest possible reductions are noticed when applying specific combinations to specific building components. We therefore recommended that building designers differentiate the design and material used for different types of building components. Furthermore, LCA practitioners should be included in the design process, to ensure that the proposed solutions contribute to mitigating adverse environment impacts.

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