This book provides a single-source reference for whole life embodied impacts of buildings. The comprehensive and persuasive text, written by over 50 invited experts from across the world, offers an indispensable resource both to newcomers and to established practitioners in the field. Ultimately it provides a persuasive argument as to why embodied impacts are an essential aspect of sustainable built environments.
The book is divided into four sections: measurement, including a strong emphasis on uncertainty analysis, as well as offering practical case studies of individual buildings and a comparison of materials; management, focusing in particular on the perspective of designers and contractors; mitigation, which identifies some specific design strategies as well as challenges; and finally global approaches, six chapters which describe in authoritative detail the ways in which the different regions of the world are tackling the issue.
Provides a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to embodied carbon calculation and reduction, with a particular focus on understanding uncertainty; includes examples of approaches used by industry professionals, and specific routes to embodied carbon reduction; identifies the methodologies, tools and standards in use around the world.
The study investigates the environmental benefits of reusing Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) panels. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of a single-stored Coffee shop built in 2016 in Kobe city was calculated, considering different CLT reuse ratios, forest land-use and material substitution possibilities. The results showed that as the rate of reused CLT panel increases the total GWP decreases. Moreover, in all cases, the option with smallest GWP is when the surplus wood is used for carbon storage in the forest, revealing the importance of a growing forest for increasing the environmental benefits of timber utilisation. The results suggest the systematic reuse of CLT panels offers a possibility to increase the carbon stock of Japanese Cedar plantation forests and further mitigate the environmental impact of construction.
The University of British Columbia has an interest in incorporating life cycle environmental impacts and financial information into project planning, as well as research and teaching. As part of a tall wood building research program with the UBC Sustainability Initiative and Dept. of Civil Engineering, a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) study was done of two student high-rise residential buildings, based on the result of whole building LCA done by Athena Sustainable Materials Institute and whole building LCC done by Sensible Building Science. These buildings are of similar design but Brock Commons Tallwood House has a hybrid mass-timber structure and Ponderosa Commons Cedar House has a more traditional concrete structure. This paper will include a brief overview of the research process, data collection, analysis, and key results. The paper will then focus on the main opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned from both the results of the LCA/LCC projects and the process of conducting the study.
In a former paper by the authors [1], the elastic behavior of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) and timber panels having periodic gaps between lateral lamellae has been analyzed. A thick plate homogenization scheme based on Finite Elements computations has been applied. The predicted behavior was in agreement with experimental results. In this paper, simplified closed-form solutions are derived in order to avoid FE modeling. Both cases of narrow gaps of CLT panels and wide gaps of innovative lightweight panels are investigated. CLT and timber panels with gaps are modeled as a space frame of beams connected with wooden blocks. The contribution of both beams and blocks to the panel’s mechanical response is taken into account, leading to closed-form expressions for predicting the panel’s stiffnesses and maximum longitudinal and rolling shear stresses. The derived closed-form solutions are in agreement with the reference FE results and they can be used for practical design purposes.
The goal of this work was to develop material quantity estimates of a typical mid-rise office building in the Pacific Northwest and to deliver the results to the Forestry Research Team in the University of Washington (UW) College of the Environment School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. The Forestry Research Team will then use these results to develop regionally specific life cycle inventory data to support the greater study funded by the 2015 McIntire-Stennis Research Grant, which is “to assist small and medium-sized wood products companies and Native American tribal enterprises to understand and adapt to changing market conditions” (http://depts.washington.edu/sefsifr/2015-mcintire-stennis-grantwinners/).
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