ABSTRACT
Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) of case study residential buildings in Ireland conducted by the authors indicated that embodied energy (EE) and embodied carbon (EC) accounted for up to 27% and 34% of LC energy usage and carbon emissions, respectively, for recently built Irish residential dwellings (Armstrong and Goggins, 2012). It should be noted that these findings were based on a small sample size and more extensive study is being conducted to determine average values of different dwelling types in Ireland. However, international studies have found EE to reach as high as 45% of lifecycle energy usage over a 50 year lifespan (Thormark, 2002).
