Embodied Energy and Carbon footprints in Residential buildings

Abstract

To satisfy the housing needs of an ever increasing population, the construction of buildings have become a large consumer of a considerably large amount of energy and resources. This human activity as well as other industrial and domestic activities if left unchecked will result in the gradual deterioration of our environment. The term embodied energy has been developed as a means to measure the energy expended during the life cycle of a building material. This life cycle consists of mining and processing of raw materials, production processes which transforms the raw materials to the desired building material, transportation to site, construction and finally demolition. The use of embodied energy as a measurement tool is currently being applied in other industrial sectors such as manufacturing and road construction. This paper aims at calculating the embodied energy and carbon footprint of a 1 bedroom 1 storey flat. Results obtained from this analysis reveal that the embodied energy and carbon of the case study building is 2878.32MJ⁄m^2 and 367.21〖kgCO〗^2/m^2 respectively