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Architecture and building industry have been made diversified efforts to create a construction environment that promotes resource recycling. Many studies have been done to better understand and reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions throughout a building’s lifecycle. However, to promote sustainable development and a construction environment that facilitates resource recycling, more understanding and research is needed on energy consumption and CO2 emissions during the stage of dismantling a building. Noting that, this research investigates CO2 emissions in a building’s End-Of-Life (EOL) phase that includes dismantling of a building, transport and disposal of the waste generated in the course of dismantling residential buildings in Korea. According to the results of this study, CO2 emissions in a building’s EOL phase was 3,561kg CO2/100m2 for apartments, 3,184 kgCO2/100m2 for brick houses and 1,137 kg CO2/100m2 for wooden houses. The results showed that transport and disposal process of demolition waste accounts for 90% of all CO2 emissions in a building’s EOL phase. From this finding, it is necessary to have a proper, effective strategy for transport and disposal of demolition waste from dismantled buildings’ in order to reduce CO2 emissions during a building’s EOL phase.

With G-SEED (Green Standard for Energy and Environmental Design), an environment-friendly building certification system, Korea is promoting the efficient energy management in the building. In particular, apartments account for the biggest share of the G-SEED authentication results. However, there has not been enough evaluation or research on the environmental performance of buildings certified by G-SEED as well as its own institutional issues. Therefore, this study compared energy consumption and CO2 emissions of G-SEED certified apartments and non G-SEED certified apartments to analyze the environmental performance of G-SEED certified apartments. The analysis shows that G-SEED certified apartments have better results than non G-SEED certified apartments in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

In recent year, Korea relies on imports for most of the iron ore, the main raw material of rebar, resulting in CO2 pollution with lots of energy consumption. Hereupon, this study carried out the research on the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the recycled rebar using the wasted steel from building demolition. For that, this study worked out the energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the process of generation, transportation and production of wasted steel and, on the basis of which, it conducted the comparative study with virgin materials. The major research results are as follows: First, the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the recycled rebar were found to be highest in the process of its production at 89.2% and 85%, respectively. In addition, in the comparison between recycled rebar and virgin material, the former was found to be most advantageous in energy consumption. On the contrary, as for CO2 emissions, the recycled rebar showed a 88.3% reduction possibility of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions comparing to statistics of input-output analysis based on competition inducement coefficient, but it was found to be more disadvantageous from the perspective of GHG reduction than the statistics of input-output analysis based on non-competition inducement coefficient.

In recent years, demolition work in Korea has been rapidly increasing, and accordingly, its environmental impact has become significant, thus requiring quantitative analysis on energy consumption and CO2 emissions generated during demolition work. This study aims to examine energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the end-life cycle of buildings. In this study, inventory analysis was conducted and basic units of energy consumption and CO2 emissions were calculated in accordance with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines published in 1996. Major findings show that 64% of energy consumption and CO2 emissions in buildings’ end-life cycle is generated in the demolition phase, and 36% in the transportation phase.