The residential sector significantly drives global energy use and emissions, underscoring the need for low-carbon, resource-efficient housing. Most studies focus on operational energy, overlooking broader environmental impacts and Circular Economy (CE) strategies. Life cycle assessment (LCA) quantifies residential buildings' environmental impacts but is often reported descriptively and weakly linked to actionable CE interventions. This study integrates whole-of-life LCA with CE principles to support decision-oriented interpretation of environmental and energy hotspots in residential housing. Using a 50-year life-cycle perspective, the environmental performance of a standard detached house and a Passive House in Australia is assessed across material production, construction, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life stages. The results show that the Passive House has higher embodied carbon (3.70 × 10 2 kgCO 2 -e/m 2 ) due to additional insulation and airtight construction, but achieves substantially lower operational energy demand, resulting in an overall reduction of approximately 63% in operational climate impacts and a lower total life-cycle impact. Hotspot analysis identifies the product stage as the main contributor to embodied carbon (3.57 × 10 2 kgCO 2 -e/m 2 ), driven by cement, steel, aluminium, and insulation, with additional contributions from maintenance and end-of-life stages. To operationalise CE principles, LCA-identified hotspots are systematically mapped to CE strategies using the ReSOLVE framework, enabling targeted interpretation across production, use, and end-of-life stages. This approach demonstrates how LCA results can inform material selection, construction practices, operational energy management, and design for deconstruction. The findings provide practical insights to support low-carbon, resource-efficient housing and promote sustainable production and consumption in Australia and similar contexts.
Gurusinghe et al. (2026) studied this question.