Embodied Energy and Carbon Emissions: A Case Study of an Infrastructure Project in Hong Kong

Abstract

With an increasing awareness of the relationship between greenhouse-gases and climate change, the concerns on environmental sustainability in different industries around the world are now focusing on the embodied energy (EE) and embodied carbon (EC) of human activities, including the construction industry. However, the implementation of sustainability construction has tended to focus on building, with less regard on infrastructure. In fact, sustainability issues of infrastructure are mainly related to the use/production/transportation of construction materials and the associated energy-consumption/carbon-emissions, none of which are negligible. The methodology for measuring the EE/EC for a bridge infrastructure is illustrated by a case study highway project - Hong Kong-Shenzhen Western Corridor (HK-SWC), in which non-negligible differences in EE/EC (about 15 - 40%) have been identified by three cases comparing different bridge forms and materials. It is therefore recommended to take EE/EC as one of the design constraints in bridge scheme development and design. With specific regard to infrastructure development in Hong Kong, the lack of an energy/carbon database for local projects is identified. Hence, it is suggested that Hong Kong (or even Southern China) needs to formulate a local life-cycle inventory in order to enable more accurate EE/EC assessments for local projects.

Keywords:

• Embodied Carbon
• Embodied Energy
• Infrastructure
• Sustainability