jaue2015015: Life Cycle Assessment of Domestic Natural Material Wood House in Japan

Abstract

We have conducted a project entitled " Achieving Climate Change Abatement and Comfortable Life by a Partnership between Forestry and Natural Material Housing(NMH) in Urban Areas”, which aims to achieve carbon neutral housing by 2050 by linking forest management to the use of domestic wood in environmentally friendly Natural Material Housing. In this paper we analyzed long period Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of CO2 emissions, from afforestation to demolishing of the house though the stages: forestation work and felling (log cutting), lumber production, house building, use of house (its main emission comes from energy consumption for space heating and cooling, cooking, hot water supply, lighting, and appliances), repairing, demolition and waste treatment including final biomass burning of the lumber wood, considering re-use or recycling of materials. Analyses results, comparing with standard cases, indicate LCCO2 emissions of Natural Material Housing are low and in some improvement case there is a remaining room to reduce more.