Vaclav Hasik

Quantifying the environmental impacts of buildings is a key step in realizing resilient and sustainable buildings. Buildings are vulnerable to natural hazards during their functional life, and the structural performance of the building affects its environmental impacts due to repair of hazard-related damage. This study presents a rational probabilistic approach to quantify the life-cycle environmental performance and functional life of buildings located in regions threatened by seismic hazards. The approach simulates multiple discrete earthquake event scenarios used to estimate the functional life of the building: an important metric for assessing the sustainability and resilience of buildings. It also calculates the hazard-related life-cycle environmental impacts directly from the materials needed to repair different components while accounting for uncertainty in each phase of the analysis. The approach is demonstrated on a case-study steel building, with illustrative results showing the impact of component groups on the overall environmental performance of the building. The building performed well structurally, but with considerable impacts due to damage to nonstructural components. The approach can be used to study a variety of building designs.

Interest in sustainability and resilience of buildings has led to a growing body of literature on merging environmental impact assessment methods with seismic loss estimation methods. Researchers have taken different approaches to connecting the two fields with the common goal of estimating the social, environmental, and economic impacts of damage to buildings subject to seismic events and thus enabling the study of tradeoffs between performance objectives. The differences among these studies include topics such as treatment of uncertainty , types of components and systems considered in the performance assessment, fidelity of structural analysis ranging from region-specific empirical fragility curves to detailed building-specific finite element analysis, scope of life cycle assessment, and so on. One of the aspects of the most diverse treatment has been in obtaining environmental impact data and relating it to pre-use impact estimates. For example, the translation of damage and repairs into life-cycle environmental impacts has been done by one of three approaches: (1) Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) has been applied to economic loss estimates; (2) repair cost-ratios have been applied to environmental impacts from the pre-use stage; and (3) repair descriptions have been used to model environmental impacts of damage scenarios directly using process life cycle assessment (LCA). All of the approaches are generally accepted but may pose limitations in certain applications and can potentially result in inconsistent conclusions from study to study. A review of existing literature in the area is presented and is followed by a comparative analysis and discussion of the outcomes of taking different environmental life cycle assessment approaches. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the research efforts in this area and discusses opportunities for further development in order to make the implementation consistent and practical for design decision making.

The historic reliance on fossil fuels as a primary energy source has
made combating climate change one of the leading environmental
challenges facing society today. Buildings account for 72%, 39%,
38%, and 14% of electricity consumption, energy use, carbon
dioxide emissions, and water consumption, respectively [1-2].
Twelve cities have joined the Architecture 2030 District Challenge
to aim to achieve 50% reductions in water use, energy
consumption, and carbon emissions by the year 2030 [3]. Unique
to the Pittsburgh’s 2030 District is the inclusion of evaluating and
improving indoor air quality (IAQ). Using life cycle assessment
(LCA) based models and real-time pollutant monitoring, we aim to
quantify the longitudinal impact energy conservation districts
(ECD) have on ambient air quality and IAQ. Indoor parameters
included within our research study include ozone, carbon
monoxide, carbon dioxide, temperature, relative humidity, volatile
organic compounds, black carbon, and particulate matter. IAQ
assessments have been completed in six representative commercial
buildings ranging from LEED Platinum certified to older, building
stock, vintage 1900s. Preliminary results suggest significant
difference in pollutant concentrations across ventilation
functionality, showing a dominant effect on pollutant dilution
related to newer buildings having continuous forced air, filtered and
then supplied to the workspace through fans and ducts. Older
buildings rely on operable windows and window air conditioners
for ventilation, which provide minimum filtration and limited
manual control of outdoor air intake influenced by plumes of
ambient air pollution which vary temporally and spatially,
attributable to industrial and traffic sources [4].