Abstract
The building sector is one of the crucial stakeholders in the global energy and environmental scenario. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool widely used to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings, materials and activities. Saudi Arabia has a rapidly growing construction sector with over $1 Trillion of ongoing projects. The housing sector, annually needing over 2.32 million new residential units in coming years, is yet to entertain environmental performance of buildings in its list of priorities. The present work undertakes a LCA study of a three-bedroom modern villa located in Dhahran. Providing the structural details of the villa, an account of the 18 main construction materials in terms of quantity and application has been produced. Embodied energy of these materials has been estimated adopting ‘cradle-to-gate’ approach. Environmental impacts of the materials have been modeled with the help of SimaPro software. The results suggest that concrete accounts for more than 43% of the total embodied energy of the house and is also the predominant material in terms of the overall environmental impacts. Steel is the second most prominent material both in terms of quantity and embodied energy.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 52 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-13 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Environments - MDPI |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords
- Buildings
- Embodied energy
- Environment
- Life cycle assessment
- Materials
- Sustainability
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
- General Environmental Science
