Comparative life cycle assessment of traditional timber jack arch slab refurbishment solutions: Eco-efficient proposal versus conventional ones

Purpose In the context of worldwide efforts to reduce plastic waste, the authors of this document patented a cement mortar floor slab interjoist prefab vault incorporating recycled plastic. This piece was designed to be used for the refurbishment of Spanish traditional timber jack arch floor slabs. Taking into account nowadays context, it is essential to assess the environmental benefits of this product. Methods A cradle to gate LCA has been performed following ISO 14044 and ISO 15804 recommendations. Thus, the aim of this research is both to provide a measure of the environmental improvement that this material adds to the building process and to compare it with current most used construction elements used for the same function. It is stressed that this study is based mainly on primary data obtained from Spanish producers. Results The results obtained show that the reference scenario, corresponding to the new patented vault, is the system with lower impacts in six out of the seven categories assessed. Furthermore, when adding the LCA normalisation step, the conducted analysis show that for the most influential impact categories, GWP100a and AD fossil fuels, the reference scenario bears the lowest scores. Conclusions It can be concluded that the new patented vault has a better environmental performance than the assessed commercial vaults. Therefore, in this research, the benefits for the construction sector to incorporate recycled plastics are shown. Furthermore, these results can encourage the research on construction products that include recycled plastics in their composition. Bearing in mind that this study assesses the impacts corresponding to the production of a prototype of the newly vault, it is considered that there is room for further improvement through the optimisation of the production process.