Environmental and energy impacts of touristic buildings using a life cycle analysis approach

What is it about?

A life cycle analysis approach was used to assess the environmental impacts for three types of hotel buildings having various envelope configurations and materials, built in different climates: Algeria and France. The study assesses through a comparative approach the impact of building components on its energy performance and their environmental cost over the entire life cycle of the building. The life cycle analysis was performed using PLEIADES software tools. The results show that it is possible to reduce the energy requirements of both traditional and standard building envelopes by assigning low-consumption building scenarios. However, although these scenarios could reduce some environmental impacts, they could also enhance others. In order to improve the results of life cycle analysis, another variant that generates less impacts than previously simulated variants was developed by retaining the following environmental scenarios: superfluous material at the site, 5%; lifetime of doors and windows should be 30 years; coating life-time should be 10 years; use of natural gas for heating; wood energy for domestic hot water; consumption of cold water should be 0.2 m3/person/day; selective collection of glass, 50%; selective collection of paper, 30%; incinerated waste, 30%; and the produced waste should not be more than 1 kg/person/day.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The results from the simulation showed that when conveying eco-energy techniques of BBC envelope to the traditional and standard building envelopes, with their operating scenarios unchanged, a significant reduction of heating energy requirement for both models. The assignment of BBC scenarios to these models seems to be a good alternative in terms of heating energy requirement which decreased to threefold for the traditional building and doubled for the standard building. However, in terms of environmental impacts, the ‘BBC” scenario helps to reduce some of the environmental impacts but on the other hand increases some others. Thus, in order to improve the results of the LCA, these scenarios may need to be coupled with a series of additional parameters to achieve a reduction of all environmental impacts for both buildings. For a new building in a Mediterranean or semi-continental climate, a satisfactory environmental balance can be achieved by the application of low-energy eco-technologies such as: -High thermal inertia for materials used -Generic insulation for vertical and horizontal walls -Reduction of thermal bridges by outer insulation -Double or triple glazing with low-emissivity This study can be an aid to decision-making about the choice of compatible techniques used in traditional or substandard envelopes for Northern part of Algeria and all regions of similar climate (Mediterranean) so that the energy and environmental balance of buildings can be improved. The developed approach will allow architects, building designers, planners and decision makers to optimise the energy consumption and environmental impacts at both the building and city scale. This will finally contributes to the reduction of the energy consumption of buildings and related environmental negative impacts.

Perspectives