Assessing the anthropogenic carbon emission of wooden construction: An LCA study

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely used to investigate the environmental performance of building developments. However, LCA studies on the construction stage emissions are limited due to its relatively minor impacts in a building life cycle. In view of the continual advancement in energy efficiency and building services, reducing carbon emissions from the construction activities will become more important. Such emission reduction is particularly crucial for wooden construction because reductions in these anthropogenic carbon emissions can enhance the utility of biogenic carbon sequestration and reduce the distance to carbon flux neutrality. This study applies LCA to a wooden construction to evaluate the anthropogenic carbon emissions from the material extraction, production, transportation, and particularly the construction stage. LCA data disaggregation is adopted to identify the unnoticed emission hotspots, contexts of the occurrence, and countermeasures against the underperformance for individual processes. The findings highlight that concrete foundation works of wooden constructions can contribute significantly to not only embodied carbon but also construction carbon emissions, and suggest courses of action for wooden constructions to reduce the anthropogenic carbon emissions. Future research should enrich the disaggregated LCA data for inter-referencing sustainable strategies to reduce the anthropogenic carbon emissions throughout the building life cycle.