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Comparative Life Cycle Analysis of a Swedish Row House Construction: New Concrete vs. Timber Frame vs. Reused Concrete Elements
Dalarna University, School of Information and Engineering, Energy Systems in Built Environments.
Dalarna University, School of Information and Engineering, Energy Systems in Built Environments.
2024 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

The building and construction sector is transitioning from a linear to circular economy to meet the global climate goals set by the Paris Agreement. Historically, most GHG emissions from buildings occurred during the user phase. In Sweden, heating emissions have decreased over the past 20 years, but construction and renovation emissions remained consistent. As operational energy efficiency improves, embodied GHG emissions now play a larger role in a building’s total life cycle emissions. A majority of the emissions occurs in the production of structural elements in addition to waste generation. One way to lowers both waste and production emissions is using reused materials. The purpose of the study is to assess the climate impact of a rowhouse in Drottninghög, by comparing the global warming potential (GWP) of three structural options: 1. Reused concrete 2. Traditional concrete 3. Light timber construction. The goal is to determine the most climate friendly option and provide valuable insights for future projects within the industry. This is a case study which focuses on comparing the GWP that is given by the Life cycle analysis (LCA) of each case. The results from the LCA shows that reused concrete has the lowest GWP, followed by the option with timber construction. Exchanging the new concrete structure to a reused concrete structure can reduce the GWP by 77%, and by 52% for the timber construction. This suggests that reused concrete can even be considered a competitive alternative to the traditional timber construction for this type of buildings. The construction sector must become more sustainable to reach climate goals. Reusing concrete structural elements is shown in this study to be a good solution to decrease the GHG in the production phase in comparison to timber construction and new concrete structure.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024.
National Category
Building Technologies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-48941OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-48941DiVA, id: diva2:1881592
Subject / course
Energy Technology
Available from: 2024-07-03 Created: 2024-07-03 Last updated: 2025-10-09

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf