Conversely, we know there’s a great deal of interest in financing clean technology, so there’s a lot of money going into an associated industry.
Compared to a residential LETI 2020 (Band C) target building (A-C) with a total embodied carbon of 675 kgCO2/m2, that is equivalent to just 0.7% reduction in carbon..Comparison of embodied carbon (A-C) between a baseline residential building based on LETI Band C and same building with Passivhaus characteristics.
The adoption of the above Passivhaus standard does not have a substantial impact on the embodied carbon compared to a standard residential building.The adoption of Passivhaus does not prevent the incorporation of additional strategies to reduce embodied carbon and all designs retain the potential to achieve low embodied carbon performance if it is part of the design intent.. Further potential benefits from Passivhaus arise from the compact shape and the use of timber, although full life cycle analysis is required to quantify this.The compact shape is predicted to reduce the absolute quantity of materials whilst timber is a material with low embodied carbon which can be ultra-low depending on its end-of-life treatment..
Timber shows its maximum potential if it can be continuously reused at the end of a buildings’ lifecycle.If it is burnt or sent to landfill it will release CO2 and methane to the atmosphere, losing its properties as a heat sink.
In order to enable timber to be continuously reused, the building should be designed for deconstruction.
Most Passivhaus buildings have not been designed for deconstruction in part due the complexity of junctions and the need to achieve the required overlapping and airtightness.MMC is the collective term for the innovative construction methods that can be deployed by the DfMA designer.
MMC can be considered as the DfMA designer’s “toolkit”.The DfMA designer finds the most suitable innovations in the MMC toolkit (or develops new innovations) to meet a project’s unique challenges..
There are many construction innovations that can be considered MMC.The UK’s Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) recently established a Joint Industry Working Group on MMC which proposed the following categorisation: 3D primary structural systems, 2D primary structural systems, Non-system components, Additive Manufacturing, Assemblies and sub-assemblies, Material and Product Innovations and Site Process Innovations.