Parametric Approach for Simplified Life Cycle Assessment of Social Housing Solutions

Abstract

Nowadays, the high emissions of the building environment together with the urbanization and the natural disasters have led to a high need of interventions on the materials and on the building process. The decrease of the environmental footprint, the achievement of sustainable solutions and the establishment of a new regenerative approach in the building sector are prerequisites in order to comply with the Sustainable Development Goals. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely recognized methodology which could contribute in the early identification and reduction of the emissions’ hotspots. However, the lack of advanced knowledge on the LCA, together with the high software costs that are connected to it, hinder its implementation in practice. At the same time, LCA requires a high level of detailed information about the construction process and therefore, it can only be implemented in the detailed design stages, where the application of changes is quite rare. Consequently, there are several limitations concerning the application of the LCA in practice. The problem can be addresses by adopting simplified LCA approaches. In the scope of the thesis, a simple methodology for the realization of simplified LCA is established. Based on that methodology an excel-tool is developed, which performs simplified LCA. The tool can execute a preliminary structural calculation for a concrete- brick house and a housing unit made of cement-bamboo frame (CBF) technology, a sustainable housing solution developed by the NGO Base Bahay in Philippines. Based on the material quantities derived from the pre-calculation, the Bill Of Quantities (BOQ) can be determined. The BOQ is connected with the emissions per material in the production stage and the emissions for the production of the two housing units can finally be calculated. The results show that the tool can give a good estimation of the final emissions, based on only a few simple parameters, which do not require advanced knowledge, neither of LCA, nor of structural design, such as the geometry, the number of the openings and the material. It was also shown that the emissions are highly dependent on the geometry. Finally, the tool has proven the applicability of the parametric LCA for the development of cost-effective solutions in the affordable housing sector.