Material and energy use in Norway's residential building archetypes

Sara Amini, Lola S. A. Rousseau and Edgar G. Hertwich

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2025, vol. 29, issue 4, 1121-1134

Abstract: Buildings require substantial amounts of resources, as both construction materials and operational energy. In Norway, as buildings become more energy efficient due to advancements in construction, technology, and stricter regulations, the relative impact of construction and maintenance materials rises. However, there is a lack of comprehensive data on construction and material use, and consequently, their embodied emissions. While some studies explored the environmental impacts of Norwegian buildings, they often either focus on case‐study buildings or only the operational emissions, due to limited data on embodied emissions; others rely on inconsistent statistical correlations between energy use and material composition. Bottom‐up physics‐based building archetypes offer a solution to fill this gap by providing structured data on energy use and material composition. This paper, therefore, introduces 21 archetypes of Norwegian residential buildings, categorized into three typologies and seven construction cohorts. Dynamic energy simulations were conducted, using DesignBuilder, for estimating space heating consumption, combined with the BuildME Python package for material estimation and aggregation. We found that load‐bearing components drive building's material intensity, especially in wooden buildings with basements. Post‐1991 multi‐family houses (MFHs) have lower material intensity than single‐family houses (SFHs) and apartment blocks (ABs), though ABs outperform them by lower space heating demand. Substitution of concrete slabs by wood and increasing occupancy to MFH's level can reduce the material intensity of ABs and SFHs, respectively. By establishing integrated energy and material demand models, archetypes provide a representative and scalable basis for further assessment of building stock's resource use, renovation impacts, and environmental studies.

Date: 2025
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