A Life Cycle Analysis Approach for Embodied Carbon for a Residential Building

The rapid urbanization process has led to a dramatic increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions in the world, which has accelerated the trend of global warming significantly. Building sector is one of the greatest contributors to that increase. In this paper, a life cycle inventory analysis model has been formulated to calculate the embodied carbon during the life cycle for a residential building. The life cycle is divided into five stages, including materials production, transportation, construction, maintenance, and demolition & disposal. A case study selected in Chongqing is used to demonstrate the application of the method. The results show that materials production stage contributes the most of the embodied carbon (90.92 %) for a residential building, and those materials contribute mostly to the embodied carbon, including concrete (36.3 %), steel (24.1 %), brick (16.6 %), cement (13.4 %) and others (9.6 %). From the perspective of subsystem to a building, structure is the largest contributor to the total embodied carbon to the building, accounting for 78.4 %. The results reveal the quantity of embodied carbon in different stages, materials and subsystems of buildings, which can help identify the optimal solution to reduce the quantity of embodied carbon in buildings and improve the environment performance.