Research On The Environmental Performance Assessment System Of Buildings And Its Application

At present, the establishment of a harmonic society is the strategic aim of Chinaand the development of the sustainable construction industry play an important part torealize of a harmonic society. Buildings have tremendous impacts on the environmentand natural resources during their whole life cycle including construction, renovation,operation, maintenance and demolition. Therefore, it is imperative to develop asustainable construction industry to reach this aim. However a building is a verycomplex system and how to assess its environmental performance scientifically is animportant topic at present.The "Research on the building environmental performance assessment systemand its application" is one of the sub-projects of the "Study on the theory and methodof life cycle environmental impact assessment of buildings and construction", aproject sponsored by China National Natural Science. There are two aims in thispaper:One is to perfect the model of BEPAS presented previously by our group. Thispaper re-described BEPAS based on the framework of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)and revised the model. The range of the environment in BEPAS was extended fromeight categories to 12 ones and a weighting system was proposed, which balanced allcategories. This weighting system reflected the social willingness-to-pay for theenvironmental damage based on the theory of social willingness-to-pay and theenvironmental tax system (including the emission charge and natural resource tax)implemented in China now. With this weighting system, the environmental impactsof all categories can be monetized and integrated into a single value.The other is to collect data of the environmental performannce of buildings.With the revised BEPAS, the environmental performance values of the samplebuildings during different life phases were calculated and analyzed. Throughstatistical analysis, the adaptability of BEPAS and the characteristics of thedistribution of the environmental performance values were examined among differentbuildings in terms of types and heights. Further, the method to reduce theenvironmental impacts of buildings was examined.Through this research, we hope to develop a criterion of the environmentalperformance assessment of buildings, which can be widely carried on in China, inorder to push the sustainable development of the Chinese construction industry andfurther to contribute to the establishment of of a harmonic society in China.