One of the most pivotal challenges facing society is balancing our demands for the built environment with its impact on the natural world. As our built environment demands increase or change, we need to be reusing buildings more to harness the potential carbon savings thorugh maximising the value of the resources already invested in our existing buildings.
By prioritising the reuse of whole buildings, we can retain more of the original material value in place and improve efficiency in terms of both energy, emissions and resources. The variation of scope and implication within building reuse is massive, from doing nothing to demolishing and replacing half a building. Embodied carbon is part of the picture and should be part of the decision-making process.
At present there is no single collated source of information about the carbon costs of differing structural adaptation interventions selected and analysed in partnership with industry experts as part of previous research. This work provides scalable values across four types of structural adaptation; removal, strengthening, foundations and additional, considering 3 prevalent existing building typologies; steel-frame, concrete-frame and load-bearing masonry.
This is achieved thorugh structural and carbon calculations to provide scalable carbon costs based on the required structural capacity. These are suitable for early-stage design, a critical time in a project where decisions have the most impact and carbon intensity can be minimised alongside other design drivers.
The results demonstrate the variation in embodied carbon cost between structural adaptations commonly considered in the UK. They also highlight the differences in carbon intensity when adapting different building typologies and show the correlations between the types of adaptation and the previously investigated intervention consideration levels. This work forms part of a comprehensive framework currently under development to inform early-stage decision making to enable successful structural adaptation.