Incorporating potential environmental impacts in building seismic design decisions

Abstract Seismic losses due to earthquakes have been shown to have significant economic, social and environmental consequences. Over recent years, research to predict potential economic and social impact due to seismic risk has been increasing. Recognizing that the traditional philosophy of life safety design can lead to extensive damage and demolition which has a large environmental cost, incorporating environmental impacts associated with the expected seismic damage over a building’s life is a key step as the building industry moves towards both sustainable and seismically resilient design. This paper introduces a framework that uses environmental indicators quantifying losses from seismic response that can then be used to advocate for a change in seismic performance objectives. First, existing literature and previously developed approaches for quantifying potential environmental impact due to seismic damage are summarized. Next, performance based earthquake engineering concepts are used to demonstrate a probabilistic approach to quantify potential environmental impacts using a range of environmental and resource use indicators over the life span of a case study building. In addition, a case study is presented to compare different environmental indicators between a Code Minimum building and the same building redesigned for a higher seismic performance. The majority of the composition of the environmental indicator values are from the inclusion of the non-repairable scenario, and from the repair activities, the majority of the impacts are from damage to drift sensitive components including curtains walls, partitions and elevators. For the Code Minimum building the non-repairable scenario contributes to between 8 to 11% the total seismic cost. For the Stronger Stiffer building, the non-repairable scenario contributes around 3% of the initial impact. Neglecting non-repairable scenarios does significantly reduce the potential environmental impacts when analyzing buildings designed for current code minimum structural standards.