Embodied carbon for residential buildings : A life cycle assessment for concrete and wooden framed buildings

Sammanfattning: The consulting firm Atkins has developed a tool to help constructers plan urban areas but the tool is lacking data about embodied carbon in Sweden. The embodied carbon is the total carbon dioxide equivalents that are emitted from the material used in constructing a residential building as well as the energy used at the construction site and during demolition. In this thesis, the embodied carbon for a concrete framed building and a wooden framed building is calculated and presented. The mapping of embodied carbon for the two different framed buildings is done with a life cycle assessment perspective. In order to structure the studied system, the life cycle of the buildings is divided into three stages. The first stage includes data and calculations about the extraction and manufacturing of the most common building materials as well as the transportation to construction site. Stage 2 presents information about theon-site construction which includes, among other things, use of machines for constructing a residential building. In the third stage, data regarding demolition and end of life management are presented and calculated. All these three stages are added and a value for total embodied carbon for concrete framed residential buildings and wooden framed ones is presented in the result. The final result shows that the studied concrete framed residential building contains more embodied carbon than the wooden framed one. Further, stage 1 represents the largest part of embodied carbon, 87% for the concrete frame and 84% for the wooden frame, and stage 2 represents a very small part for both types of buildings, 1% for the concrete frame and 2% for the wooden fame.