Toward the ecological footprint of the use and maintenance phase ofbuildings: utility consumption and cleaning tasks

Description

Due to poor design of buildings in terms of maintenance, there are a number of buildings today thatremain extremely expensive to maintain, both economically and environmentally. In order to mitigatethese overheads, the development of a cost database is needed with which the resources required to cleanand maintain buildings can be estimated. This paper presents a methodology to estimate these costs andthe environmental impact, in terms of Ecological Footprint (EF), associated to the utility consumptionand to the cleaning tasks necessary during the service life of buildings. Given the numerous peculiaritiesidentified for this type of activity compared to the construction of buildings, it is necessary to definea new methodology of calculation, with its own assumptions and formulae. This methodology is thenapplied to the case of a college hall of residence that houses up to 139 residents. The results show thatthe annual EF of cleaning tasks accounts for 11.42% of the EF of utility consumption. Together they total67.334 global hectares per year (gha/yr), 88% of which corresponds to the carbon footprint. Within theEF of cleaning, about 71% is due to food consumed by labor, while 26% is due to the manufacture ofcleaning products and tools, which are equally divided among the six categories of productive land.The development of this methodology is essential for the detailed quantification of the environmentalimpact of utility consumption and cleaning tasks that occur during the service life of buildings. The use ofdiscount rates on results is included in terms of the EF of a baseline year, as an equivalent to the discountrate in economic terms

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