The building sector has attributed a significant focus on improving its sustainability performance, as it contributed to almost 38% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2019, and is estimated to be the least environmentally friendly industry worldwide. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is considered a rewarding method for evaluating the environmental impact caused by buildings or individual building components, based on various environmental indicators such as carbon dioxide emissions. A life cycle analysis can be performed in different ways depending on the purpose of the analysis. Screening LCA is a method which can be used to get an overview of the environmental impact associated with different life cycle stages. The method accounts for the environmental impact caused by value chain and the physical flow in production of materials and systems. This method can also be useful to analyze the carbon footprint of a building during its production phase, A1-A3, and transports of materials to the construction site, A4. This can enable to peruse and reduce building’s carbon footprint by replacing materials with more environmentally friendly ones before the building is built.Besides the aesthetical benefits, green solutions such as green facades (or living facades) can create the possibility to obtain more environmentally friendly buildings. Although green facades are not a new concept, such system has increasingly been adopted on the facades of buildings in recent years. While, it has been proven that green facades have the ability to absorb pollutants and carbon dioxide from the air, their production serves additional CO2 emissions.This study has been conducted in collaboration with Ramboll Sweden AB, the division of sustainable buildings. The study aims to increase knowledge regarding green facades and their impact on the exterior walls, both thermally and environmentally. In the study, 8 models were created and analyzed to explore the CO2 impact of green facades on different alternative exterior walls. In this study, an LCA was performed, and the impact of living facades on the heat transfer coefficient, the U-value, was analyzed for each of which models. Furthermore, an estimation of possible carbon dioxide capture by green facades was carried out to explore the potential benefits of such facade systems from a life cycle perspective.The results show that a living façade can result in approximately 27.9 kgCO2e/m2 compared with an exterior wall without a living façade. However, the ability of such facades to capture carbon dioxide can make it possible to compensate this additional carbon dioxide emission during almost 93 years, if a linear CO2 capture is assumed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-447532 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Raptis, Christos, Hagberg, My |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Byggteknik och byggd miljö |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| 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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