The construction sector is responsible for around 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with building envelopes playing a significant role in this carbon footprint. This is particularly relevant for building facades with large window-to-wall ratios.
This paper presents a whole LCA across seven cities for standard and advanced glazing solutions, including Water-Filled Glass (WFG). WFG is a novel technology that utilizes water in the cavity of insulated glass units (IGU), to improve thermal comfort, energy and acoustic performance of buildings.
The paper provides a comparative analysis of different glazing techniques. The significance of this paper is that a comprehensive cradle-to-grave LCA analysis of standard and advanced glass techniques is presented here for the first time, across all major Köppen-Geiger climates.
The results show that WFG presents considerable carbon savings against all other options , underlining the possibility of reducing operational and embodied carbon simultaneously.
A second novel outcome of the paper is introducing the Glass Viability Index (GVI) for the first time, which presents the ‘carbon payback’ period required to offset an embodied carbon increase with operational savings.