Building structures emit around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, which must be tackled with appropriate material substitutions. The present study quantifies the environmental performance of structural beams. It compares engineered bamboo beam and reinforced concrete (RCC) beam for constructing a residential house 100m 2 built up from each beam type. The carbon sequestration of the engineered bamboo beam is also calculated at the product level. This research employed life cycle assessment (LCA) following the ISO 14040 guidelines and quantified and compared the environmental impacts for both alternatives across nine midpoint impact categories. Primary data for the RCC and bamboo beams is collected from the construction site and the bamboo product manufacturer in India. Secondary data are mapped using the Ecoinvent 3.11 database. The results highlighted an uncommon trend in LCA of material substitutions with bamboo. Except for carcinogenic human toxicity and resource depletion, the impacts of bamboo beams are higher than those of RCC beams for a house of 100m 2 built up in all other considered midpoint categories. For climate change and water depletion categories, the value of RCC beams is 73.52% and 80.77% lower, while for resource depletion, they are 390.79% higher than engineered bamboo beams. Electricity and steam consumption, raw bamboo usage, and waste residue are the most contributing resources to the overall impact of engineered bamboo beams. Alternatively, Portland cement and reinforcement steel usage are the resources that contribute the most to the impacts seen in RCC beams. This research suggests that with current energy and resource usage, bamboo beams are not an environmentally viable structural alternative to RCC beams, even with carbon sequestration potential during the growth of Bamboo. This study proves again that life cycle assessment studies are essential before selecting materials in product development.
Paliwal et al. (Thu,) studied this question.