Sustainability evaluation of foundation systems: a comparative life cycle analysis of screw piles and bored piers

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:LCA practitioners and construction researchers can use the comparative data for benchmarking.

🏢実務担当者:Construction firms can use these findings to select foundation systems with lower carbon footprint.

🏛政策担当者:Regulators can reference this for building code updates targeting embodied carbon reduction.

ABSTRACT Beyond ensuring the structural integrity of the foundation system, its sustainability is equally important, as enhancing the environmental performance of foundations plays a key role in advancing sustainable construction. There are different types of foundation systems, and their applicability varies on the type of the building and the soil conditions. The main objective of this research is to evaluate the sustainability of screw piles (SP) and bored piers (BP) through a life cycle analysis (LCA) from the perspectives of carbon emission and energy consumption. A cradle-to-grave LCA is performed for the pile systems, starting from the manufacturing to the end-of-life, to quantify the associated global warming potential (GWP) and energy consumption (EC) of both BP and SP. This study follows a process-based approach, where individual processes associated with each life cycle stage are considered separately in the analysis. For an average job with 50, 3-m piles under normal circumstances (i.e. standard material and machinery use, normal weather), screw piles showed a 56% reduction in GWP and a 34% reduction in EC compared to an equivalent bored pier system. However, based on the pile length and the diameter impacts can vary and at higher length, SP have significant low environmental impacts compared to BP.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.1080/13287982.2026.2625356first seen 2026-06-29 07:15:54