Bamboo as a sustainable construction material for residential buildings in the cold and severe cold regions of China

ABSTRACT

bamboo is a construction material with excellent mechanical and thermal properties. It also has excellent carbon storage capacity and is already widely recognized as a sustainable construction material. This study quantifies the bamboo’s potential for energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction throughout the building life cycle in the cold and severe cold regions of China. A six-storey residential building is applied as a case study for a comparison between reinforced concrete (RC) and laminated bamboo lumber (LBL) construction in five representative cities. The comparison considers the inventory analysis of the materialization, operation, and end-of-life (EoL) stage, energy consumption as simulated by the commercial software IES-VE, and carbon emissions assessed by a process-based method. The results for the five cities show that the use of bamboo instead of the conventional reinforced concrete structure would reduce energy consumption by 3%∼5% and reduce CO₂ emissions by 7%∼20%. The analyse of results demonstrates that bamboo residential buildings are more carbon-efficient in cold climates. Furthermore, this study clarifies the applicability and sustainability of bamboo construction materials and contributes to suggesting alternatives for the life cycle carbon reduction for residential buildings.

KEYWORDS:

• Bamboo construction materials
• residential building
• carbon emissions
• energy saving
• life cycle assessment

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 52078153) and the Heilongjiang Province Natural Science Foundation (grant number LH2019E110).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 52078153].