Life cycle assessment of tiny houses in the Netherlands

The main objective of this paper is to examine the impact on the global warming of construction and insulation materials which are used for a tiny house. This study consists of a life cycle assessment of three tiny houses: one built with only new materials (Case A), one built with only reclaimed materials (Case B) and one tiny house built with new and reclaimed materials (Case C). The cradle-to-gate phase enclose the raw material extraction, manufacture construction and insulation materials, transport of the raw materials to the manufacture, transport from the shop to the building site, transport from the building site to the living site and the electricity use for the used tools. The life cycle assessment was conducted in GaBi Education Software in combination with the ecoinvent Database and primary data from the interviews. The functional unit is formulated as kg CO2 per square meter of tiny house for a lifespan of 50 years. Sheep wool has the highest impact on the global warming potential per square meter. And the result shows that the transport has a low environmental impact in comparison with manufacturing of the materials. This paper considered sheep wool as main product without taking allocation into account. Buying materials that are found locally is more environment friendly.