An Assessment of Residential Building Materials Impact on Environment Using BIM through a Case Study Approach

Abstract

Building construction can result in carbon emissions that have a substantial negative influence on the environment. Studies show that 40% of global Co2 emissions each year are caused by the built environment and Cement is a widely utilized building ingredient in the construction industry, an essential part of the concrete mix. Approximately 7 % of the carbon emissions in the world are caused by cement. By substituting low-emission and sustainable building materials for those with higher carbon emissions, the building\'s carbon emissions can be decreased. Using materials that are long-lasting and have low embodied carbon when are sourced ethically. Reduced carbon emissions from construction materials can be achieved in large part by early decision making in AEC phases. In this paper an assessment of residential building materials impact on environment is carried by using BIM and LCA tools and difference in embodied energy is observed by optimizing the building plan.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

In the construction industry, two key concepts are gaining traction for their ability to promote sustainable design and decision-making - Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). While they serve different purposes, their integration offers significant advantages for environmental impact reduction and overall project success. BIM is a technology for creating and managing digital representations of physical buildings. It goes beyond 3D modelling by incorporating rich data about building components, their properties, and relationships. This allows for better collaboration, improved design decision-making, and efficient project execution. LCA is a methodology for assessing the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction and manufacturing to use, maintenance, and end-of-life disposal. This holistic approach helps identify potential environmental hotspots and make informed choices for sustainability. Despite these challenges, the construction industry is actively addressing them through standards development, software advancements, and educational initiatives. The future of sustainable design lies in leveraging the power of BIM and LCA together, paving the way for environmentally responsible and efficient building practices.

According to current projections and future developments, the sustainable development process heavily relies on the combination of BIM and LCA. The construction industry's use of lowemission building materials is crucial to the creation of sustainable designs with minimal carbon emissions. As a result, there is less eutrophication, acidification, global warming, and embodied energy. As discussed above BIM tool – Revit Software is used for the developing of 3D model. Two models were created using Revit with optimization in plan for the area of 1500 m2. These models are directly integrated with different LCA tools like One Click LCA, Tally and IdeMatLCA.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW AND METHODOLOGY

BIM is found to be ideally suited to the delivery of information needed for improved design and building performance. Two most significant benefits of BIM for sustainable building design are: integrated project delivery (IPD) and design optimization. However, there are also barriers to adopting BIM for sustainable design [1] (Wong, K. and Fan, Q, 2013). European governments continuously update their building regulations to optimize the building envelope and energy systems to achieve this during the building use stage, at least in Spain the building regulations do not take into account the impact of emissions resulting from urbanization and construction activities prior to building use [2] (Rodríguez Serrano, A. and Porras Álvarez, S, 2016).

Aiming to investigate the environmental impacts, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology evaluates products and services showing the similarities and differences in evaluating midpoint and endpoint impact categories [3] (Najjar, M.K. et al, 2019). Digital tools based on Building Information Modelling (BIM) provide the potential to facilitate environmental performance assessments of buildings. Various tools that use a BIM model for automatic quantity take-off as basis for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) have been developed recently. It describes the first application of such a BIM-LCA tool to evaluate the embodied global warming potential (GWP) throughout the whole design process of a real building [4] (Hollberg, A., Genova, G. and Habert, G, 2020).  In the early building design stage, there are numerous uncertainties due to the lack of information on materials and processes. Designers therefore cannot quantify the environmental impacts of buildings in order to evaluate the environmental performance of their designs early on [5] (Rezaei, F., Bulle, C. and Lesage, P, 2019). The study assessed the environmental assessment of the three most used structural systems for residential buildings in the local context (concrete, steel and composite structures). This was compared for four main points: 1) life cycle stages, 2) main building elements, 3) building materials and 4) impact categories [6] (Morsi, D.M.A. et al, 2022). Studies on embodied carbon and carbon emission of construction materials in India are intensively taking place. The Indian infrastructure sector is associated with carbon emission, which is to be immensely optimized to control the carbon emission [7] (Naga Dheeraj Kumar Reddy Chukka, 2022). Despite the apparent simplicity of existing BIM-LCA tools, there is a lack of integration with the main BIM software, and the double-effort of design development and parallel simulations is a barrier to their implementation in the design process. Moreover, simplifications on these tools may provide misleading results to the designer [8] (Lucas Melchiori Pereiral, 2018). The construction industry has become more interested in moving towards implementing an innovative method to reduce wastes and Environmental Impacts (EIs) during the construction stage. Tools and methods represented in different frameworks to estimate construction wastes are limited to the end-of-life stage of building projects. A common method employed for this quantification is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which is globally recognized as one of the most complete methods for the environmental impact assessment of buildings [9] (Milad Zoghi & Afshin Khoshandb, 2019).

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2024 P. Sai Ganesh, S. Dharma Teja, V. Thanusha, Y. Bhargavi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.