Reduction of Carbon Footprint of Building Structures

Degradation of environment is currently at huge risk because of factors related to population growth, resource consumption, industrial activity, etc. This situation is causing serious environmental problems which called for new building developments to bridge the gap between this need for reduction of environmental impacts and ever increasing requirements on living. The developments were generally directed at the reduction of the energy consumption during occupation. But this increase of savings in operational energy is reflected on higher embodied energy and associated emissions from material production. The case study is focused around some issues of environmental performance pertaining to embodied energy, embodied emissions CO2-eq. and SO2-eq. from building structures. The optimization of material compositions of structures with passive energy standard are aimed at using materials from biomass in order to create green design. The plant materials serve as a long-term carbon store and use solar energy for production of raw material. The designed passive house from optimized compositions of alternatives achieves low embodied energy (2357.374 MJ per useful area), high negative balance of embodied CO2-eq. (-356.764 kg CO2-eq. per useful area) within construction phase of LCA. One of possible ways of reduction of carbon footprint of building is introduced in the paper.