Quantifying Environmental Performance in Prefabrication Developing an environmental performance assessment tool for the Dutch prefabrication construction sector
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Last Updated: 5-2024
This thesis addresses the issue of the construction sector’s impact on climate change and explores the
role of prefabrication as a possible sustainable solution. It highlights the significance of the construction
sector’s contribution to global emissions, the current and expected housing shortage in many countries, and
prefabrication’s role in addressing these issues. The study aims to develop a tool to assess the environmental
performance of prefabricated sandwich elements using Building Information Modeling (BIM) integration
and a public Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) database. The goal is to overcome existing barriers
to implementing prefabrication, including a lack of clear assessment methods specific to prefabrication and
the difficulty in communicating the environmental performance of prefabrication this causes. By providing
stakeholders with a user-friendly tool designed to work with publicly accessible data and the accompanying
methodology for structuring this data, the research seeks to facilitate informed decision-making and
promote the adoption of sustainable construction practices.
The tool developed in this thesis aims to streamline the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) process for
prefabricated sandwich elements. The developed tool relies on data from a public EPD database but is
impacted by the use of open-source data, increasing the ease of implementation of the tool yet limiting
its accuracy due to the lack of access to official databases. This tool, created using the PyQt module
in Python, is tested against existing verified EPDs of prefabricated sandwich elements. This validation
shows no unrealistic results, but the exact accuracy remains difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, the tool
represents a step towards bridging the gap between prefabrication’s potential environmental benefits
and practical implementation in the construction industry, aiming to promote a more sustainable built
environment.