Environmental impacts of prefabricated school buildings in Catalonia

Building school centers using industrialized technologies has been a common practice in Catalonia, Spain, since 2002. Over 200 public educational edifices have been assembled using these technologies, in order to provide the required number of schools in due time. These schools serve as examples of modern educational architecture and their building technologies have particular features compared to non-prefabricated ones. In this article these technologies are analyzed from a technical and sustainable point of view, in order to determine how they improve the quality of these buildings and reduce their environmental impact. A life cycle analysis has been carried out comparing the three main industrialized technologies and a non-prefabricated one. All of these technologies have weak points and this research recommends a new optimized technology based on them. Renewed current technologies could reduce both resources consumption and waste generation but would never be able to close the materials cycle as the recommended technology does.

► The building industry should have a production model based on the biosphere.
► A building’s life cycle waste can be reduced down to 60% by prefabricating it.
► This article studies 200 schools recently prefabricated in Catalonia.
► In a school center, the phase that generates the most CO2 emissions is the production phase.
► A new prefabricated system is proposed which reduces the environmental impact by 50%.