Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for a School Building Retrofit Regarding Embodied and Operational Carbon Emissions

Retrofits are applied to buildings as climate mitigation and adaptation measures in the built environment. Passive retrofit measures can contribute to decreased operational energy consumption and carbon emissions. In addition, passive cooling measures can become more significant since they can perform without a power supply. However, the embodied carbon emissions from the retrofitted building components and materials should also be taken into consideration due to their impact on total carbon emissions. Moreover, retrofit measures are vital for educational buildings since school buildings host vulnerable people, such as children. This study aims to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) for school building retrofits, including different shading elements, to provide an optimized retrofit solution. The building is modeled in Revit to extract material quantities used in LCA calculations. This extracted information is embedded into the One Click LCA tool to calculate embodied carbon emissions, while DesignBuilder is used to calculate operational carbon emissions with energy consumption. The results show that operational carbon emissions are remarkable contributors to total carbon emissions, while embodied carbon emissions from the product stage are the second. In the meantime, medium-II retrofit scenarios, especially the Medium-II R03, are the most efficient LCA scenarios.