Toolkit to capture environmental emissions in construction phase of buildings in the Australian context

Buildings consume a large amount of natural resources and generate high volumes of environmental emissions. A number of studies have attempted to quantify these life cycle emissions of buildings. Unlike other phases, emissions at the construction phase of a building include both greenhouse and non-greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the emission studies on buildings have either overlooked or concentrated only on greenhouse gas emissions when considering emissions at the construction phase. On the other hand, the majority of the commercially available software either lacks reliable inventory or involves complex modelling processes to quantify emissions at the construction phase. Many industry personnel and researchers observe the requirement of a simple toolkit which can accurately evaluate emissions at construction phase with minimum effort. Thus the main focus of the study is to develop a toolkit which can estimate and compare emissions due to materials, equipment usage and transportation at construction phase of the building. The emission factors published by United States Environmental Protection Agency, Australian National inventory report and Inventory of Carbon and Energy were adopted to develop the mathematical models in the toolkit to estimate greenhouse and non-greenhouse gas emissions due to equipment usage, transportation vehicles and materials, respectively. The main functions of the toolkit also include comparison of emissions between two construction methods and activities of the project. A case study was utilized to justify the validity and implementation of the toolkit. This developed toolkit will aid researchers and construction contractors to estimate and compare emissions of different construction techniques with minimum effort.