Abstract

The rising profile of carbon footprinting in building lifecycle has caught the attention of many in the construction industry and academic circles. There is an increasing awareness of the effectiveness of an holistic approach by calculating the entire impact of the building by considering all stages of whole life carbon emissions including the initial, annually repeating and end of life impacts as this gives a better representation of the scale of the impact compared with focusing on savings achieved by adopting a specific elemental choice.
It is now widely realized that we are living on a planet with finite resources and that we should make every effort to reduce our ecological footprint. Within the construction industry, it is now accepted that tackling environmental sustainability alone is not sufficient and that we have to adopt a holistic approach by addressing the other two aspects of sustainability namely social and environmental. To reduce its huge impact, accounting for almost half of the global greenhouse gases and consumption of the materials entering the global market, the industry has succeeded in developing new and innovative solutions. These include the reintroduction of traditional construction techniques, refurbishment and conversion against new built, renewables and similar initiatives.
This paper investigates savings in the carbon emissions of refurbishing buildings compared against a new build scenario. Whole life emissions calculations have been carried out to analyse the total environmental impact including embodied and operational stages of building life cycle. The paper also highlights the results of the survey carried out to analyse the building in-use dimensions for environmental quality of the newly refurbished office building.