System Dynamics Modeling of Life Cycle Carbon Footprints for Building Wall Insulation Materials

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool to assess environmental impacts of a product. However, the reliability of LCA should be improved, since the current static methodology does not take temporal variations into account. Accordingly, the dynamic LCA (DLCA) approach is gaining increasing attention. Despite the rapid development of DLCA in the building engineering, investigation on reliable dynamic modeling methods considering the circularity of building materials is still missing. To cope with this problem, we propose a framework of system dynamic modeling of building materials' global warming potential (GWP) over the complete life cycle of a building. The framework is then applied in the case study of simulating the GWP of eight common building wall insulation materials with two improvement strategies considering a circular material flow. As a result, the established framework is proved feasible and can be implemented in future DLCA modeling. Results also show that considering recycling potential in a circular system results in a reduction of life cycle carbon foot print. Accordingly, the importance of circularity is highlighted.