Purpose This study evaluates and compares various building design standards to determine which leads to the lowest life cycle emissions. By examining different energy standards and design choices, this research provides insights into sustainable building practices that minimise environmental impact throughout a building's life cycle. Methodology The research methodology involves a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment for a case study building and different variants. The LCA was conducted by using the software eLCA. Building energy simulations were conducted to assess the impact of the design decisions on the operational emissions. The simulation software Rhino and Honeybee were used. Furthermore, the variants were analysed under various scenarios to compare their life cycle emissions if the system boundaries of the LCA are expanded. Findings No clear energy standard can be singled out as the best-performing energy standard as it highly depends on the system boundaries chosen and the actual energy demand that has to be covered by the on-site energy production. However, the results highly depend on the chosen system boundaries. Furthermore, changing to sustainable building materials results in higher energy demand but does not automatically lower the LCE of a building. Nonetheless, two key findings concerning design decisions could be identified: 1) All scenarios showed that the amount of insulation materials used in the base case to reduce the energy losses of the building was too much as a lower energy performance can potentially produce less LCE. Highlighting that when evaluating the performance of a building, embodied emissions should also be considered. 2) The analysis showed that the full potential of onsite energy production should be harnessed as all variants with the same energy demand performed better the more PV modules were installed. Keywords: Embodied emissions, life cycle emissions, design standards, life cycle assessment, energy simulation, operational emissions, sustainable building, and energy-efficient design.     «

Purpose This study evaluates and compares various building design standards to determine which leads to the lowest life cycle emissions. By examining different energy standards and design choices, this research provides insights into sustainable building practices that minimise environmental impact throughout a building's life cycle. Methodology The research methodology involves a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment for a case study building and different variants. The LCA was conducted by usin...     »