Life cycle assessment of bamboo\|constructed house.

Bamboo, before used as structural materials of buildings, must be modified to meet the needs of physical and chemical quality. In its producing processes, chemical materials are applied and thus its environmental performance has been doubtful. We conducted LCA in this study to quantify the environmental loads and their potential impacts based on a demonstration project:a twolayer bamboo construction village house in the Bamboo Engineering Research Centre in Nanjing. Single indicator of the total environment load was calculated to provide guidelines for material selection. The results indicated that, the environmental load of raw material acquisition, transportation, production, construction phase respectively accounted for 30.82%, 3.43%, 52.17% and 13.57%. In the material constitutes of the building, bamboo structural material accounted for 43.93% of environmental load, including 14.59% of that from the PF adhesive, while the environmental load contribution of steel materials used for the bamboo construction house was as high as 3.21 times of PF adhesive. It can be thus concluded that major environmental load of the bamboo-constructed village house still comes from the most common building materials, such as steel and concrete.