Life Cycle Assessment of Construction Materials: Cradle-To-Gate and Cradle-To-Grave Approach

Sustainability is one of the most important issues for the current world. Sustainability is commonly clouded by differing interpretations and by a bent for the topic to be treated superficially. For most corporations, countries and people UN agency do take the topic seriously the construct of property embraces the preservation of the surroundings similarly as essential development-related problems such as the economical use of resources, continual social progress, stable economic process, and therefore the Wipeout of financial condition. Life cycle assessment is one in all the foremost developed and wide used environmental assessment tools for comparison different technologies. LCA quantifies the amount of materials and energy used and the emissions and waste over the complete supply chain (i.e. life cycles) of goods and services [9]. Life-cycle analysis is use to describe the entire life of a material or product up to the point of disposal. The main aim of the research is to make the comparative environmental analysis of a load-bearing column, with different cross-sections considering both ―cradle-to-gate‖ and cradle-to-grave/cradle approach. A simple-supported column, 5 m long, is considered for this research. The load bearing capacity of the column of an axial force of 5000 kN and a bending moment of 100 kNm (around the strong axis for the profile column). The column is constructed by the materials of steel section, rebars, concrete. The impact for production of construction materials, result of impact, impact for transportation of materials are calculated to know the total impact for production, transportation, waste treatment at cradle to gate to grave approach. From the LCA analysis it is shown that the cradle to gate approach has more environmental effects for each case. The product either steel profile or rebars or composite concrete is used for recycling has less effects on environment for acidification, global warming and photochemical oxidation. But for non-renewable and renewable energy, it has less amount for cradle to grave/cradle approach. So, cradle to grave/cradle approach is eco-friendly for all products