Sustainable bathroom design

Sammanfattning: Skanska is one of the leading construction companies in Sweden when it comes to sustainable construction. Buildings are responsible for 40 % of both the global energy consumption and the global resources. With the current demand on housing, the building pace needs to increase whilst improving on sustainability. The level of industrialisation in the construction sector is still low compared to other sectors. Prefabricated components such as walls or slabs are common and during the last decade, prefabricated bathroom modules (henceforth referred as pods) have been introduced and are now used quite frequently in commercial buildings. A pod is a completely factory manufactured bathroom that is just lifted in place. The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate pods from a sustainable perspective and compare them to a traditional site built bathroom. Data is collected through field studies, interviews, a survey, reference projects and research.The analysis consists of seven key factors, Design, Human Resources, Waste, Time, Transport, Economy and Energy. The analysis resulted in improving four of the seven key factors when using pods; Human resources, waste, time and economy. The main benefit was reduced production time and thereby large cost savings, that for the reference project was 6,6 % of the total project cost. Usually, life cycle costs are not included in the initial costings, which gives a misleading price. Pods are a suitable concept for projects with at least 25-30 bathrooms, where the end user does not affect the design and where there is at least 20 bathrooms for each model.