Ever since the Swedish government declared their long-term goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, the importance of life-cycle assessments (LCA) in the building sector has increased. In 2018 the building sector in Sweden was responsible for 21% of all emissions. The first step of reducing carbon emissions is done by declaring its origins, which is where LCAs are helpful. An LCA include all CO2 emissions emitted within a products lifespan, all the way from raw material acquisition to the end of life. It is divided into different phases according to the European standard EN 15978 and the purpose of an LCA is to determine how much emissions each individual phase accounts for and then determine where the biggest improvements can be made. In this thesis an LCA of a new building is compared to an LCA of a renovated building in order to determine whether or not it is more environmentally friendly to renovate a building. The LCAs in this thesis was done using the web-based software One Click LCA and the life-cycle phases A-B were analysed. A case study was made on the multifamily buildings in Umeå, Sweden with the help of detailed drawings. The major interests of this report has been to get more knowledge in how to perform LCAs and to see whether a renovation of a building results in lower emissions as compared to a new building. The results showed that the new building had about 23% more CO2e emissions per m2 than the renovated building for a lifespan of 60 years when using a Swedish energy mix, where the renovated building's emissions was 345kg CO2e/m2 and the new building's emissions was 425.4kg CO2e/m2. The embodied carbon was about 2.5 times higher for the new building compared to the renovated building and the energy use B6 for the new building accounted for 33.2% of the total CO2 emissions while it was 72.3% of the renovated building's total emissions. When the lifespan was increased the new building became a more and more attractive alternative and it would've surpassed the renovated building soon after 100 years as the more environmental friendly choice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-197597 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Holmbom, Emil |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för tillämpad fysik och elektronik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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