Life-cycle assessment of cold formed steel buildings: Main influential materials and parameters

Reducing the carbon footprint of the built environment is a duty to achieve the target of the 2030 Urban agenda. The built environment is, indeed, responsible for about 42% of of the EU total energy consumption and about 35% of the greenhouse gases emissions. One of challenges in reducing the impact of building on the environment is in quantifying them, with a good degree of accuracy. To this end, over the last decades, life cycle methodologies and met-rics have been developed for the assessment of green-house gases impacts of material, products, and components, that can be applied by academics and professionals. However, the quality of the assessment relies on the quality of data related to the amount of materials used for the stud-ied building or component, and the corresponding adopted embodied carbon coefficients. This paper aims to shed light on this two key aspects investigating the cradle – to – gate life cycle impacts of a cold formed steel building, for which high accuracy is provided in terms of amount of materials and for some of the embodied carbon coefficients. The results will provide a useful benchmark for the wider academic community in terms of environmental impacts of cold formed steel structures, which is still a under-investigated field, and shed lights on the uncertain-ties generated by the selection of embodied carbon coefficients.