Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of residential apartment in lskandar Malaysia: a comparison between conventional and Industrialized Building System (IBS) construction method

Abstract

The rapid urbanization has great impact on housing demand and housing development in lskandar Malaysia. lskandar Malaysia places great efforts towards low carbon society and the encouragement of Government of Malaysia to use the Industrialized Building System (IBS) to meet this rapid housing demand. There are still limited case studies of life cycle assessment (LCA) had been conducted on the energy consumption and carbon emission between IBS and conventional cast in-situ for residential apartment building in lskandar Malaysia. A comparative analysis of LCA has been conducted to identify the energy consumption and carbon emissions for both methods The functional unit of the comparison analyses was one square meter of produced and operated building area for a period of 50 years. This enables comparisons to be made between different types of buildings. System boundary of life cycle assessment for the comparison analysis was set to include from the cradle to gate of life cycle assessment for residential building. An inventory analysis also been carried out from the data obtained from the developers to calculate the energy consumption and carbon emission on every process. The input-output flowcharts have been created on each process to determine the component included in the analysis. Finally, all the process will be modelled using Gabi 6.0 software to further interpret the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) between the two construction methods and to determine the hotspot between the processes. In this paper, results and discussion will be focused on the comparison on energy consumption and carbon emission based on the inventory analysis. It is shown that by constructing a low rise multi storey residential building with IBS is more beneficial in terms of lower energy consumption and carbon emission. Results shows that the operating (75-90%) and embodied (7-15%) phases of energy use are most significant contributors to building's LCA. In additions, the IBS building is contributing a lesser embodied energy use that is 28% and demolition in IBS building also gave a significant reduction in energy use that is 55%. Hence, energy and carbon emission indicative figures for compared with the results of both construction methods are presented in this paper.