Life Cycle Assessment of Expanded Polystyrene Lightweight Concrete Using Traci 2.1 Methodology

In 2021, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a global status report that showed 37% of the world's annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions came from the building industry. The same report of UNEP in 2018 states that almost 40% of energy-related CO2 came from the same industry 11% of which is from concrete, this makes concrete the biggest source of CO2 emissions among all building materials. This shows how important reducing greenhouse gas emissions from building materials is, with concrete being one of the most significant contributors, mitigating environmental emissions of concrete by innovating aggregate replacements such as Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) has become one of the potential solutions to this problem. However, there are minimal investigations regarding the life cycle of EPS Lightweight Concrete (LWC). This paper presents the life cycle assessment (LCA) of EPS LWC using the Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and Other Environmental Impacts 2.1 methodology along with its comparison against traditional reinforced concrete, CAB70 LWC, and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) concrete. In this study, tables and graphs revealed significant differences on the environmental impact values of four different types of concrete and the result shows that in comparison with traditional reinforced concrete, EPS LWC contributes a significant change in mitigating most of the environmental impact categories. However, it is not the same case with the CAB70 LWC and PET concrete, EPS LWC evidently has higher environmental impact values but the difference was not as significant as that of against traditional reinforced concrete.