Carbon footprint for interior design, material and furniture

Hi all, this is Rana, I was looking into the topic of the impact of interior design on the carbon footprint of a building. I see few research on the topic. However I wonder if anyone would suggest a case study that looks into the impact of cyclical renovation (re-modelling) on the embodied carbon?

Hi Rana and welcome to the One Click LCA Community!

There is not much research available on this topic and from a regulatory / certification perspective the interiors are generally not included to the LCA of the building. This will surely change in the near future as we already see examples where e.g. the MEP elements are mandatory to be included to assessments.

Interiors can have a large impact on the carbon footprint, e.g. if you take a data center as an example, the majority of the emissions will be from the equipment housed in such a building. Furthermore the assessment period can also contribute greatly to the overall emissions as with commercial structures (lets say stores) they sometimes only have the same interior for a few years, after which it may be completely replaced.

Unfortunately I do not have a case study on cyclical renovation which I can share with you, we have clients undertaking such studies but generally the information is not published. If you do find some interesting case studies then please do share them!

Thank you steven for taking the time to answer my question. I came across a case - study from practice, which highlighted the impact of furniture on the whole life cycle. They demonstrated that furniture for example can amounts for up to 50% in embodied carbon across the lifetime of an office building. This is a result of frequency of change (15 year renovation) and quantity of furniture used. I still believe that we need to have research to emphasis this impact on a different typologies such as offices, and retail as you mentioned.

That sounds about right, yes, by the time when assessing interiors becomes commonplace only then can we truly tell what the impact is on the total emissions of a project. Another blocker to including furniture and other interior elements in an assessment is that there often is no environmental data available for these materials, as this is not a purchasing criterion yet. We see this changing albeit slowly.