Houses Based on Wood as an Ecological and Sustainable Housing Alternative—Case Study

Jozef Švajlenka and Mária Kozlovská
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Jozef Švajlenka: Department of Construction Technology and Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Technical University of Košice, Vysokoškolská 4, 042 00 Košice, Slovakia
Mária Kozlovská: Department of Construction Technology and Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Technical University of Košice, Vysokoškolská 4, 042 00 Košice, Slovakia

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 5, 1-20

Abstract: Sustainability of cities is currently a much-debated topic. The trend in Central Europe we witness nowadays is that people are going back from the impersonal and restrictive conditions of tower blocks to the more natural and relaxed conditions of family houses. New approaches to urbanization in the context of the sustainability of cities can be characterized by their use of innovative technologies and energetically efficient and ecologically acceptable construction materials. Companies have substantially responded to this trend, meeting the demand by offering a wide range of solutions. Alongside the traditional and long-established construction materials (brick, concrete), including wood, companies are introducing modern, innovative, and viable construction alternatives. Modern methods of construction (MMC), to which modern houses based on wood belong, promote the idea and application of environmentally and energetically efficient constructions. Just as the construction process itself significantly contributes to the depletion of natural resources, the production of construction materials contributes to significant environmental pollution and greenhouse emissions (particularly CO 2 ). Sustainability assessments of construction projects increasingly involve the use of methodologies which assess sustainability criteria throughout a product’s Life-cycle. For our analysis of suburban housing clusters designed to serve as family houses, we chose an actual family house construction completed using a modern construction system based on wood. For the sake of comparing the modern construction method, we created an alternative model of a construction based on a traditional masonry construction system. The main objective of this contribution is to analyze selected variants of constructions in terms of environmental and economic sustainability characteristics, as part of a broader assessment of permanent sustainability, by applying the life-cycle assessment (LCA) and life-cycle cost (LCC) methodologies within specified assessment boundaries. A partial objective of this contribution is to point towards the ways of applying the LCA and LCC assessment methodologies, such as in the decision-making processes involved in alternative investment strategies for the construction of urban clusters in the context of sustainability.

Keywords: building; economic; environment; life-cycle assessment; life-cycle cost; life-cycle time; modern methods of construction; sustainability; wood; wood house (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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