Global water and energy losses from consumer avoidable food waste

Food products require significant amounts of energy and water throughout their lifecycle, yet humanity wastes 1.3e9 tons of food on a yearly basis. A large part of this waste occurs during the consumption (post-retail) phase of the food system as avoidable food waste, the discarded edible (parts of) food products. In this study, we explore the...

Redesign of a Facade System Based on an Environmental Impact Assessment Framework

The building industry is responsible for 36% of global final energy use (Global Alliance for Building and Construction, 2018), 39% of CO2 Emissions (Global Alliance for Building and Construction, 2017) and 50% of global waste in just cities (Ellen Macarthur Foundation, 2017). This is mainly due to the linear economy model which is still the...

Grow. Feed. Educate: Sustainable farming growing naturally over time

Following the model of collective farming of the Soviet Union, Romania’s agricultural sector was transformed during communism in Agricultural Cooperatives for Production. In the period 1949 – 1962, the country’s agricultural land was collectivized in such state-owned cooperations. The project ended up failing and leaving the country’s sector of...

Sustainable structural design of high-rise: Life-cycle assessment of main load bearing structures of high-rise buildings in the Netherlands

High-rise buildings are a potential solution to the environmental impact caused by the built environment and the increasing demand for space in urban areas. As recent developments focus on reducing the impact by operational energy (OE) (heating, cooling, hot water and ventilation during use phase), impact by the embodied energy (EE) (production,...

Framing the Views

The transformation of buildings is one of the main emergent themes in contemporary architecture. This does not only count for monuments, but also<br/>for the existing housing stock. This graduation project deals with the transformation of 4 buildings in Delft, build in the ERA- building system – a non-traditional construction system.<br/>Because...

Revitalisation of the gallery apartment building

Thirty-one percent of all the energy used in the Netherlands is used by households. Considering the fact that it is technically easily possible to built energy neutral dwellings this quite big percentage. But with the speed we are currently constructing houses, we will build less than 10 percent of the currently existing building stock in the...

Embodied energy optimization tool

About 40-50% of global raw materials are currently used in the building industry in the assembly/construction phase and in the use phase of the building and are responsible for 40-45% of total worldwide anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (Huovila [5]). These problems have led to the development of legislative policies, regulations and...

Sustainability and Service Life of Curtain Walls

The goal of this thesis is to study the service life of a curtain wall and identify which is the best duration in terms of sustainability. Two scenarios, one short-term and one long-term, will be analysed and eventually compared in order to make the final decision. For both scenarios the embodied energy and CO2 emissions will be calculated. Time...

Integrating Life Cycle Energy into the Design of Façade Refurbishment for a Post-War Residential Building in The Netherlands

The existing building stock has been in the focus of European Union policies for energy savings. Nevertheless, energy certification schemes refer mostly to operational energy and usually do not consider aspects related to the life cycle of the building. To look at the overall energy cost during the lifespan of a building, the energy used to...

Embodied Optimisation Tool for low-rise office buildings in steel

This thesis investigates the development and application of a computational tool that optimises the conceptual stage design of a building to have minimum embodied energy and some aspects of the operating energy, depending on the adaptability required. For this purpose, a parametric computational framework for sustainable building design was...

Cable strengthened arches

The structural efficiency of arches, subjected to several variable loads, can be increased by strengthening these arches with cables. For these structures it can be necessary, especially in case the permanent load is small, to post-tension the cables to avoid any compression acting on the cables. A method to analyse the load transfer is...

Life cycle façade refurbishment for post-war residential buildings

In this graduation research the life cycle energy (embodied and operational energy) of a refurbishment project is researched by means of a literature study and a case study design. A design approach is made to make the life cycle energy as low as possible for the case study, an existing post-war residential building in Utrecht. The focus of the...