Water and energy consumption in schools: case studies in Brazil

Lucas Niehuns Antunes () and Enedir Ghisi ()
Additional contact information
Lucas Niehuns Antunes: Federal University of Santa Catarina
Enedir Ghisi: Federal University of Santa Catarina

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2020, vol. 22, issue 5, No 18, 4225-4249

Abstract: Abstract Over the past decade, rising water and energy consumption in educational institutions has become a topic of increasing attention among the scientific and policy communities. This work assesses the potential for water and energy savings in 100 public schools in southern Brazil. There was great variation in the water consumption (0.81–35.43 l/student/day) and also great variation in the energy consumption (0.31–66.47 kWh/student/month). Two schools were selected for assessing the implementation of a rainwater harvesting system and improvements in the artificial lighting system. One of the schools has high water and energy consumption, while the other has low consumption. In the school with high consumption, the potential for potable water savings by using rainwater varied from 2996 to 5431 l/day; and the payback period ranged from 20 to 36 months. The potential for energy savings by improving the artificial lighting system was 62%; and the payback period was just five months. In the school with low consumption, the potential for potable water savings by using rainwater ranged from 542 to 1574 l/day; and the payback period ranged from 46 to 83 months. As for the improvements in the artificial lighting system, there was an increase of 13% in the monthly energy consumption due to the current low illuminance levels in the classrooms. The results show the importance of choosing strategies for decreasing water and energy consumption in schools. Such strategies are usually economically and environmentally feasible, bringing significant reduction to the consumption of water and energy.

Keywords: School building; Potable water saving; Energy saving; Rainwater; Lighting system; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-019-00380-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:endesu:v:22:y:2020:i:5:d:10.1007_s10668-019-00380-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-019-00380-x

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().