Measuring the correlation between carbon embodied emissions, economic and social impacts of building elements in Spain

Abstract

Abstract Buildings produce significant environmental impacts, as well as economic and social impacts in society. The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is recognised as an appropriate method to assess their impact following a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach. In the European context, incoming regulations for building are beginning to consider the embodied environmental impact of new construction. However, the economic and social implications of those concerns have been scarcely explored. Implementing the LCSA on different building elements involves a great amount of data. Difficulties in data management and the weighting of different dimensions are also detected as methodological challenges. To reduce the effort in the LCSA implementation in the building design process the Building Information Modelling TBL (BIM_TBL) database includes a collection of the most frequently used building elements in Spain, which is integrated in BIM. This study presents the main results of data analysis of the BIM_TBL database to determine the correlation between the environmental, economic, and social impacts generated by different constructive solutions. To that end, a Knowledge Discovery Database (KDD) analysis was performed to support the multi-dimension integration in the design process. This study provides recommendations to integrate a multi-dimension approach in the building design process.