Environmental sustainability modeling with exergy methodology for building life cycle

As an important human activity, the building industry has created comfortable space for living and work, and at the same tune brought considerable pollution and huge consumption of energy and recourses. From 1990s after the first building environmental assessment model BREEAM was released in the UK, a number of assessment models were formulated as analytical and practical in methodology respectively. This paper aims to introduce a generic model of exergy assessment on environmental impact of building life cycle, taking into consideration of previous models and focusing on natural environment as well as building life cycle, and three environmental impacts will be analyzed, namely energy embodied exergy, resource chemical exergy and abatement exergy on energy consumption, resource consumption and pollutant discharge respectively. The model of exergy assessment on environmental impact of building life cycle thus formulated contains two sub-models, one from the aspect of building energy utilization, and the other from building materials use. Combining theories by ecologists such as Odum, building environmental sustainability modeling with exergy methodology is put forward with the index of exergy footprint of building environmental impacts.