Environmental impact of industrial prefabricated buildings: Carbon and Energy Footprint analysis based on an LCA approach

The world-wide effort to reduce the environmental impact associated to the industrial sector is quickly producing an increasing feedback on national and international decision makers. In this context, the analysis of life-cycle based assessments on the main impact categories associated to the pre-production, production, assembly, use, and end-of-life phases represents a powerful tool towards a holistic interpretation of the footprint from industrial buildings. The Italian prefabricated building sector, characterized, on average, by local enterprises with regional coverage, has been investigated in order to study the Carbon and Energy Footprints. Data from a large company, running several facilities spread on the national territory, have been collected and analyzed in order to provide a parameterized evaluation of the GHG emission and the energy consumption associated to the single phases of the building life cycle as a function of the sensible design requirements. The quantification of the Carbon and the Energy footprint, associated to the prefabricated industrial building sector, is presented. The assessment procedure is performed through a parametric modeling of the building properties bases on the analysis of different sizes and designs. A detailed discussion of the outputs is presented, including the comparison of the environmental performance depending on different construction requirements.