The Trade-Off Between the Economic and Environmental Impact of Conventional and Green Building Materials

The building stock in India is estimated to grow by five-fold from 2005 to 2030. Building causes significant environmental impact, and it is imperative to reduce the environmental impacts of buildings to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 11. This study integrates Building Information Modeling (BIM) with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This integration supports novel decision-making paradigms of building design as it considers sustainability parameters along with traditional engineering performance parameters. The BIM-LCA integration method was applied to a multi-storied residential building in Mumbai, India. The BIM model was created in Autodesk Revit, and then outputs data were converted to an appropriate input format by recomputing the materials of construction. Further, the converted material of construction in terms of physical mass units was used for analysis in OpenLCA. The environmental impacts of the building with different materials of non-load-bearing wall assemblies are calculated to determine the best building assembly options from the economic and environmental perspectives. A comparative analysis of building assemblies through its life cycle stages was conducted. The results provide a robust decision space to make an informed decision by building designers to select optimal designs, considering the trade-off between economic and environmental impact. Green building assemblies are found to be costlier than conventional assemblies in the product stage and construction stage of the building.