To calculate the environmental impacts of buildings, it is
necessary to know the amounts of materials required to erect one
building and the distances that the materials need to travel from the
production site to the building's final location. The amounts and
locations of the materials for the shelters were determined from the
following reports: 8 shelter designs [2]; 10 post-disaster shelter
designs [3]; the environmental impact of brick production outsideof Europe [32]; and the optimization of bamboo-based post-disaster
housing units for tropical and subtropical regions using LCA methodologies
[33]. These reports include bill of quantities, plans, performance
analysis, and lifespan of the studied shelters. To develop
the Life Cycle Inventories (LCI), all the amounts were converted into
mass (kg) units and the transport distance into ton x km. These LCIs
represent the production phases of each shelter and the transportation
distances for the construction materials. Two types of
distances were included, local (road) and international (freight
ship), which were estimated based on the area of the country of
study. A relationship between a country's area and construction
material transport distances was defined based on the literature
[32,38e45]. This trend is described by the following formula:
Transport distance ¼ 76:275*Lnðcountry areaðsq:kmÞÞ
621:59