Life cycle sustainability assessment of RC buildings in seismic regions

• Framework for seismic sustainability assessment of RC buildings.
• Evaluation of environmental, economic and social impacts.
• Case study application demonstrating the effects of structural design on lifetime performance.

Sustainability of civil infrastructure is measured in terms of three integral components: economy, environment and society. Recent devastating natural disasters worldwide have underscored resilience to natural hazards as an important aspect of sustainability, which directly affects all three components mentioned above. In this paper, a life-cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework was developed and used for sustainability quantification of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings subjected to earthquakes. The sustainability through various stages of the lifetime of an RC building was obtained in terms of cost and downtime (related to the economy component), environmental emissions and waste generation (related to the environmental impact component), and deaths (related to society component). Sustainability components were evaluated by successive completion of the hazard, structural, damage and loss assessment in accordance with the performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) methodology. The proposed approach incorporates at least one metric from all essential components of sustainability: economy, environment and society within the same framework in life-cycle performance evaluation of RC buildings in regions of high seismicity.