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Roofing materials are between most essential constructions materials of any building. Over the centuries roofing materials used in Sri Lanka have evolved from renewables materials of low life span such as woven coconut leaf, Palmyra leaf, paddy straw etc. to materials with longer life such as clay tiles, cement asbestos fiber sheets and zinc or gal...
Citations
... conducted for the EPS wall panels by Dissanayake, Jayasinghe, & Jaya-singhe, (2016) in their study. Moreover, cradle to gate life cycle assessment for the clay tiles available in SL has been conducted byIhalawatta, et al., (2014). ...
Being a significant industry, construction works, especially buildings reason for a massive amount of carbon related emissions throughout its life cycle. Therefore, researchers all around the world are searching solutions to minimize these emissions of building life cycle. Moreover , Initial and Maintenance Cost plays a significant role in building cost. Being a developing country, cost effective sustainable building materials are really beneficial for SL. Nevertheless, there are very few life cycle Embodied Carbon and Cost studies have been conducted in SL to distinguish the cost effective sustainable building materials. Moreover, Roof is a cost significant element of the building. Therefore in considering all above, this research was aimed to determine the life cycle Embodied Carbon and Initial and Maintenance Cost of Roof materials available in SL. Since, clay tile (both conventional and fully automated), asbestos sheet and concrete are the most widely use Roof materials available in SL, these were considered as the Roof materials for this research. Then, life cycle Embodied Carbon and Initial and Maintenance Cost of these Roof materials were calculated for a house model based on the collected data through process analysis and documentary reviews. Eventually, all four Roof materials were ranked based on the gained values. There, the conventional clay tile was crowned as the least embodied emission Roofing material and asbestos Roofing was identified as the most economical Roof material. Eventually, this study provides a guidance as well as a methodology to evaluate other building materials in terms of life cycle Embodied Carbon and Initial and Maintenance Cost.
... In that respect, the ENGINEER research was conducted LCA towards ecodesign in floor tile industry by using scenario analysis [13]. The study investigated and compared the environmental impacts of different roofing options available locally [15]. Study results reveal that modern-day construction and architecture are gradually moving towards sustainable or green building concepts. ...
... Moreover, this study has shown the importance of reducing biomass and electricity consumption during the manufacturing process. Kuruppuarachchi et al. has performed an LCA of two clay roofing tiles such as clay roof and asbestos in Sri Lanka, where one uses traditional manufacturing methods, and the other follows the modern manufacturing practices, and scope was set as cradle to gate [15]. Also, a vital contribution analysis is not available in the assessment. ...
... The energy requirements of the production process of tiles mainly arises from the firing phase that also reflects in the embodied energy of tiles, while clay mining, transportation, manufacture, and packaging accounts for the less than the 20% of the total energy demand [84,85]. However, more recent studies have revealed lower environmental impact as a result of more energy-efficient manufacturing processes with less losses and shorter raw material transportation distances [86]. Nevertheless, the reduction of the total life cycle environmental impact of a standard roof can be achieved using recycled roof tiles or selecting insulation materials and waterproofing membrane made of recycled materials [83]. ...
The considerable lifecycle consumption of energy and raw materials of construction projects is not just a challenge faced by the construction sector; it is also an economic, environmental, and social concern, which needs immediate action. In view of that, performing an objective evaluation of the novel "greener" and sustainable construction materials for the urban environment requires a set of well-established methodologies and tools invoking reliability and validity. This chapter introduces EcoHestia, a new comprehensive environmental building material assessment tool, which addresses the assessment of the environmental performance of construction materials for the urban environment, in terms of a whole life cycle approach. A detailed literature section presents the evolution and the development towards the existing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework, as well as the state-of-the-art and recent trends in the implementation of LCA of ecomaterials for the construction industry. The relevant European legislation and well-established existing LCA methodologies and tools are also presented. As regards to EcoHestia, this book chapter elaborates on the motivation of development of the specific tool, the definition of its scope, as well as the methodology behind the development of its Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and the calculation of its Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) results. Within the same context, limitations commonly linked to environmental assessment tools are extensively discussed. The findings of this chapter primarily establish the usefulness of employing LCA for supporting the definition of the most energy-, material-, and cost-efficient construction materials for the built environment.
... The study was done for S1 clay roof tiles manufactures in Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Further data available [24,25] for Asbestos roofing sheets and Calicut roof tile were referred for selecting minimum and maximum values for each indicator. The functional unit selected was the amount of each roofing options required to cover one square metre (1 m 2 ) area of the roof. ...
The construction industry has boomed significantly in Sri Lanka after the 30 years of war. This has created unprecedented demand for some construction materials, and some of them are extracted or mined from virgin sources. Even several building materials such as cement, roofing sheets, etc. need to manufacture before they are being used which contribute substantially to the environment during the manufacturing phase. Conversely, due to the growing interest towards sustainable built environment or greener buildings has made curiosity within the construction industry to move towards sourcing of greener materials or to secure greener supply chains for the construction industry. However, it is difficult to identify the environmental impacts of construction material and specially to assess or compare in a quantifiable manner. Therefore, this research focuses on developing a tool to indicate environmental impacts taken into account the phases of the supply chain which are rarely come to the surface. This tool has been developed based on life cycle assessment concept. Life Cycle Assessment is a well-recognized methodology used for quantifying the magnitude of the potential environmental impact of a particular system during a selected period of its lifetime. Commercial software's have been developed to conduct these studies, but they are dependent on the primary databases which have been prepared considering regional geographical representations. Therefore, it is difficult to use these software due to non-availability of country and region-specific data/information in the commonly used databases. However, this research overcomes this barrier with some alternative means to develop the final tool. Based on the developed tool, it is easier to compare environmental hotspots for the selected impact categories specifically highlighting the particular phase which has a significant impact in the way of different colour coding system which can be easily compared by the construction industry professionals without deep knowledge in Sustainability or Greenness of the supply chains.
... LCA is the best method to aware on the environmental performances of the industry. But in local context, there is very few life cycle assessments based research works can be seen related to ceramic industry (Edirisinghe, 2013) and building materials industry (Abeysundara, Bebel and Gheewala, 2009 (Kuruppuarachchi, Ihalawatta and Kulatunga, 2014) has conducted a comparative LCA between two different clay roof tile manufacturing practices and extended with a comparison of asbestos sheet manufacturing. This comparison shares the knowledge on environmental impact categories which can be occurred in clay roof tile industry. ...
Even though clay roof tile manufacturing technology has been transformed with modern technologies, partially developed small scale roof tile manufacturing practices are existed in Sri Lanka. In conventional clay roof tile manufacturing process, no any other energy source had been used rather than bio mass and solar heat. Ancient people had used human power for clay excavation, clay preparation and forming. And they had dried tiles in natural solar heat. Dried tiles had been fired by burning bio mass. Timely, electrical machineries were used for clay processing stages to fulfil the increasing demand for clay roof tiles. Eventually, this semi-conventional roof tile manufacturing process was completely transformed to high energized processes with use of fossil fuel fired kilns and hot air supplied driers. As well as, clay preparation processes have been developed with automated systems with arrival of new technologies. However, local clay roof tile industry is consisted with both semi-conventional and modern roof tile manufacturing practices. Significant technological and energy consuming differences can be seen in three types of manufacturing practices and conventional practice is a fully environment friendly process. Hence, complete studies of semi-conventional and modern practices in environmental aspect are highly beneficial to enhance sustainability in clay roof tile industry. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the scientific methodology for environmental performance evaluation by considering product life cycle. Mainly, semi-conventional roof tile manufacturing process is concerned a cradle to gate Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) was conducted by SimaPro software. Impact levels were interpreted for main four sections of process in different impact categories. At the end of assesment, environment hotspots and environment impact generating roots were identified by logical reasoning. Findings of the research can be directly applied for the eco-designs in industry and several guidelines have been given in the paper.
