Whole Life Carbon Assessment for Building Enclosure

Abstract The purpose of this study was to understand the impact of building enclosures, which are a combination of various building materials, on whole-life carbon (WLC). In order to examine the trade-offs between Upfront carbon (UC) and operational carbon (OC), case studies were conducted on typical enclosure types of high-rise buildings. For the case studies, the Japan Carbon Assessment Tool for Building Lifecycle (J-CAT) [1] was used to conduct parametric analyses having greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity and enclosure type as parameters. The results showed that significant gaps in GHG emissions were caused by selecting different types of either materials or GHG intensity databases. In addition, in each case the increase/decrease in UC was larger than the reduction in OC thus reducing UC, for example by adopting low-carbon aluminum, were found to be significantly important to lower the WLC of buildings.