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Whole-building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a passive house of the sub-tropical climatic zone

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2016.10.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • In this work the LCA of a passive house, located in an insular island state within the sub-tropical climatic zone, is implemented.

  • Concrete is the greatest contributor across all environmental impact categories by more than 55%.

  • Plasterboards, plywood, mineral wool, and tiles have significant impact on the environmental performance results.

  • Additional insulating materials in the building’s wall systems does not affect significantly the building’s embodied energy.

Abstract

The Passive House concept requires the incorporation of a combination of energy-efficient solutions, which despite their benefits they also burden the environmental performance of the passive house construction with additional resource depletion and energy consumption. The aim of this work is to implement a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a passive house located in an island state, having an insular energy system, within the sub-tropical climatic zone. For the implementation of the life-cycle study, the building environmental assessment tool EcoHestia was employed. Under this context, the environmental performance of the passive house was established and presented on (a) a construction material breakdown basis and (b) a building element breakdown basis. Additionally, the optimization of the passive house design was defined through a parameterization analysis of its embodied energy and primary energy demand. The findings of this work indicated that concrete (C20single bondC25) is the greatest contributor across all environmental impact categories, except in the abiotic depletion of elements category, where tiles were found to be responsible for more than the 65% of the total impact. The analysis also indicated that the foundations and floors and the wall systems are contributing considerably to the environmental performance of the passive house. Additionally, a parametric analysis indicated that employing insulating materials in the building's wall systems can have a beneficial effect in the energy efficiency of a building, without burdening substantially its total embodied energy.

Introduction

The building sector is strongly associated with adverse social concerns, such as environmental issues and the human health. However, the current policies perceive the built environment as the sector with the most opportunities and potential in achieving energy savings and carbon reductions. Among the context of the European legislation on energy efficiency and energy conservation, the Passive House concept has been developed. The Passive House concept has been established by the Passive House Institute in Darmstadt, Germany, and has quickly developed in the world‘s leading construction concept for energy efficient design of buildings. The requirements of a passive house are typically met through a combination of energy-efficient solutions and practices, including bio-climatic design, advanced building envelope insulation, heat recovery ventilation system incorporation, high performance windows, and high air tightness levels. However, these energy-efficient solutions also burden the environmental performance of the passive house construction with additional resource depletion and energy consumption, which may lead to the reduction, or even the offsetting, of the environmental benefits gained by the building's reduced energy demand.

The main focus of this paper is to implement a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a passive house located in an island state, having an insular energy system, within the sub-tropical climatic zone. An insular energy system is defined by the country's incapability, due to smallness and/or remoteness, to interconnect with other electricity generators and consumers through a wider transmission grid outside its national borders (Fokaides et al., 2014, Fokaides and Kylili, 2014). The motivation of this work is to demonstrate the environmental performance of passive houses and how it can be further improved through building design optimization. The construction of passive houses is expected to strongly support the island states’ transformation into smart energy regions in an effort to alleviate some of the adverse impacts of their energy systems’ distinctiveness (Fokaides et al., 2014). The methods of this study are expected to promote the employment of effective building environmental assessment tools incorporating life cycle approaches for the definition of the environmental evaluation of new and existing buildings, as well as the optimization of their design. The findings are anticipated to encourage the construction of passive houses to regions of similar climatic conditions, in addition to island states that share similar (insular) energy systems. They are also foreseen to provide significant support and guidance for the further improvement of the future passive house design and be used productively for the transition towards a more sustainable building sector.

Section snippets

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of construction materials and building elements

The increasing concern over the energy expenditure of the built sector and the associated impacts to the environment, has spark the interest of the construction industry in employing LCA approaches (van Dijk et al., 2014). Accordingly, so far the LCA approach has been employed for the evaluation of a number of construction materials and systems. Chrysostomou et al. (2015) conducted LCA for concrete manufacturing in small island states, Habert et al. (2010) for natural resources used in

Approach

For the investigation of the environmental performance of a passive house located in an insular island state within the sub-tropical climatic zone, an actual building satisfying the specific requirements of the Passive House standard was chosen – the Tseri passive house. Whole-building LCA will be conducted through the employment of the building environmental assessment tool EcoHestia. The Bill of Quantities (BoQ) of the Tseri passive house will be used as an input to the EcoHestia system, and

Concrete

Concrete C20/C25 is commonly-used concrete grades for the construction of building structures, with the grades representing the concrete compression resistance after 28 days. Based on the LCIA results presented in Table 1, Table 2, it is evident that the specific concrete grades are the greatest contributors across all impact categories, except in the AP elements category. This is attributed to both the energy-consuming process for concrete manufacturing, as well as the large quantities of

Conclusions

The key objective of this paper was to implement a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a passive house located in an insular island state within the sub-tropical climatic zone. Using the data facts of the Tseri passive house, an actual building that satisfies the building design requirements of the Passive House, whole-building LCA was conducted through the employment of the building environmental assessment tool EcoHestia. The quantities of the building materials used for the construction of the

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