Life Cycle Assessment of Embodied Carbon and Strategies for Decarbonization of a High-Rise Residential Building

Abstract

The construction sector is responsible for the 40% of consumed resources, 40% of CO2 emissions, and approximately 40% of construction and demolition waste. For the assessment of the building, there exists a standardized method, life cycle assessment (LCA), however, the process requires time, cost, and most importantly expertise. In this paper, a method is proposed and analyzed for the life cycle assessment of the building for the embodied carbon in the three stages, construction, operation, and demolition. Moreover, the result of the analysis is considered as the base result, and de-carbonization strategies identified through literature study for the three stages of construction, operation, and demolition are assessed with the same method to know how much each strategy will be effective in minimizing the embodied carbon. For the base case, a high-rise residential building in an urban region of India is analyzed, based on existing conditions through the building information modeling (BIM) method. The carbon emission of the selected building comes out to be 414 kg CO2e/m2/year, and assessing different decarbonization strategies, considering the first analysis as the baseline, it can be minimized to 135 kg CO2e/m2/year.

Keywords

• construction
• operation
• demolition
• decarbonization strategies
• carbon potential
• urban region of India