Commonly, the housing built in Egypt has not considered in its design process the environmental and energy aspects. The materials used to build are mostly the cheapest, and not necessarily the most appropriate to the environment and the local climate. The literature survey by the authors indicated that no studies are available on the building materials using life cycle assessment (LCA) in Egypt. Therefore, this study comes on line to partially cover this gap. The main objective of this paper is to perform an LCA of four common building materials from the Egyptian residential sector considering the first four stages of the LCA. The brick types are often built with four systems based on the following materials; Straw/Raw, Sand, clay and cement brick. Therefore, the focus in this paper is to assess the potential environmental impacts of these four types on midpoint and endpoint methods by using SimaPro software under IMAPCT 2002+ method. The assumed functional unit is one Kilogram of each brick type. The collected available inventory data of Egyptian bricks of the four types are utilized (partially) in this paper. As the results of midpoint method, the clay brick has the largest adverse environmental impact. In contrast, the straw/raw brick results in a difference of 170 Eco-point by 68% increasing, and especially the non-renewable energy impact category. Considering the endpoint method, again, clay brick has the largest human health damage and resources depletion. On the other hand, the straw/raw brick results in a difference of 75 Eco-point by 75% increasing. Therefore the authors conclude that using straw/raw brick is the more friendly to the environment while the worst brick type which hurt the environment is the clay brick (red brick) and then the cement brick.
Research Member
Research Department
Research Year
2014
Research Journal
The 4 th to 8 t h of November 2014 at the "Nouveau Siècle", Lille, France
Research Publisher
Life Cycle In Practice
Research Vol
NULL
Research Rank
3
Research_Pages
NULL
Research Website
NULL
Research Abstract