Life cycle environmetal impact assessment of a multi-storey residential building in Izmir

Abstract

For a sustainable development, it is essential to improve the building stock and sector which are majorly affiliated with the negative impacts on environment. The analysis of current situation and establish the basic problems in order to decrease the environmental impacts of buildings. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a holistic and scientific method in the area of environmental impact assessment. While the LCA may be applied to individual building components or specified life cycle phases, it is also possible to assess the environmental impacts of a building from cradle to grave with an integrated approach toward whole life cycle. The purposes of this study are to evaluate the current position of the LCA method, which is a vital component of the sustainability assessment in building sector, and to make a quantitative assessment on the environmental impacts of multi-storey-mass housing which has the primary share of recent residential building stock in Turkey. One residential unit of a mass housing development in Izmir constructed at the last decade, at the edge of the expanding city boundary, was selected as the case object of this study. The life cycle of building is fundamentally examined in three phases, which are: pre-use phase, use phase and end-of-life phase. The Simapro software 7.3.3 and Ecoinvent 2.2, up-to-date database, were selected for the LCA simulation. In addition, as a local input to database, energy data for Turkey was created. As a result of this study, the environmental impacts during the life cycle of a multi-storey building residential unit have been ascertained and the life phases, building components and operational processes which have the heaviest impact on the environment have been determined.