Demolish or Refurbish an Existing Building? : A bachelor thesis on the climate impact of different methods of renewing a building

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to evaluate different alternatives of renewal regarding an already existing building. The case study building is located in the Ulleråker area in Uppsala, Sweden and is an old mental hospital building from the 1950’s which Uppsala Municipality wishes to restore as part of a bigger investment in the neighborhood. The different alternatives that will be investigated are refurbishment, with different insulation thickness, and a complete demolition and reconstruction of a new building with either wood or concrete. Carbon dioxide emissions connected to buildings will be calculated and analyzed as two elements, one being embodied carbon dioxide, and one being energy usage. Other aspects of interest, the economy and cultural values of the area, will be discussed. To estimate the amount of CO2 emissions, several life cycle assessments will be executed through the software One Click LCA (2015). Calculations will be done by hand in order to estimate the energy usage. Information and data are partly obtained from Uppsala Municipality, partly from literature and available resources. The results show that each option has a different advantage, the refurbishment resulting in considerably lower embodied carbon (114 kg CO2e/m2) but higher energy usage (95 kWh/m2 per year) as compared to the new concrete construction with larger amount of embodied carbon (279 kg CO2e/m2) but lower energy usage (44 kWh/m2 per year). This leads to a conclusion showing that a deep refurbishment is the best option regarding both embodied carbon and energy usage