The Environmental Based Selection of Building Materials in Office Building

Abstract

The greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, acidification and climate changes in general are well known environmental problems of nowadays. One of the most significant polluters of the environment at all is the building industry. The industry affects the environment in many ways. The construction process and building materials production not only consume the most energy and create huge amount of CO2 emissions, they also create a lot of waste, use non-energy related resources, and are responsible for the overall pollution. Extraction of raw materials to production of building materials, transportations, as well as build-up, operation or demolition of buildings requires massive amounts of energy and it results in huge amounts of greenhouse gasses or acidifying emissions, participates in depletion of ozone layer, eutrophication processes or photochemical ozone creation. The building materials environmental evaluation and its proper selection based on the environmental point of view is one of the significant ways to pollution reduction and energy consumption minimization.
This paper is aimed at the environmental assessment of selected building constructions of office building in Slovak republic and the alternation of building materials in order to reduce the environmental impact of the construction. The selected building has four storeys and a basement. The roof construction of the office building was chosen for the environmental evaluation. Three environmental parameters were taken into the consideration: amount of the greenhouses gases related to the building materials (Global Warming Potential - GWP), amount of the acidification gases (Acidification Potential - AP) and energy consumption regarding the material producing (Primary Energy Intensity - PEI). Data of the particular materials originated from the Austrian LCA database and included the loading of environment within the raw materials extraction, transportation, and material production up to material distribution. Based on this data the values for the whole construction were calculated using MS Excel tool by Createrra. The calculated values of GWP for the original roof construction reached 1,599,340.84 kg CO₂eq, the acidification potential AP was 407.48 kg SO₂eq and the primary energy PEI was calculated up to 544,593.23 MJ.