Environmental impact of thermal insulations: How do natural insulation products differ from synthetic ones?

1st International Conference on Advances in Environmental Engineering

生态环境科学

Dovjak, M.^1 ; Koir, M.^1 ; Pajek, L.^1 ; Igli, N.^1 ; Boiek, D.^1 ; Kuni, R.^1

Department of Buildings and Constructional Complexes, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Jamova cesta 2, Ljubljana

1000, Slovenia^1

关键词: Decision making tool;    Environmental awareness;    Environmentally friendly buildings;    Eutrophication potentials;    Global warming potential;    Insulation products;    Life Cycle Assessment (LCA);    Synthetic materials;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/92/1/012009/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/92/1/012009

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

As the environmental awareness of the public is rising and at the same time contemporary buildings are becoming more and more energy efficient, the focus is shifting towards the usage of environmentally friendly building products. Human decisions are often driven by emotions and perceptions. Consequently, there exists a strong tendency towards preferring "natural" constructional products to the synthetic ones, especially in the case of thermal insulations. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has enabled an opportunity to widen the meaning of the word "environmentally friendly", giving researchers and building designers an objective decision making tool to determine the environmental impact of building products, building components and buildings as a whole. The purpose of this study was to compare the environmental impact of various thermal insulations for the cradle to gate life cycle stages, based on a unified functional unit. Overall, 15 most commonly used thermal insulation products were analysed and classified into natural and synthetic groups. Based on the differentiation, we compared the impact in the selected environmental categories and identified the most influential environmental drivers. The results show that in some environmental categoriesnatural thermal insulations perform better (i.e. global warming potential), whilein others (i.e. eutrophication potential) they underperform. However, environmental impact trends can be identified, specifically for the natural and the synthetic materials.