۱٫۱٫ Background

It has been widely reported that buildings generate one third of Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (UNEP, 2009a) and over 40% of global energy demand (UNEP, 2009b). The global population is projected to increase by 30% in 2050 (United Nations, 2017) and, as ever, new buildings will be necessary. According to quantitative data, the operational phase of the building is widely expected to dominate the life-cycle impact, mainly due to heating and cooling requirements (Ghattas et al., 2013). The embodied phase, which includes materials manufacturing and transportation, construction, maintenance, renovation, and demolition is expected to contribute 10e20% of the life-cycle impact of a building (UNEP, 2009b). Nevertheless, the embodied phase in low-energy buildings can represent as much as 50% of total life cycle impact (Ghattas et al., 2013). A high impact that is due to the lower impacts of the operational phase and the greater use of materials, especially energy intensive materials (Sartori and Hestnes, 2007). This study is focused on the foundation of the building, which is the part that transfers loads from the building or the structure to a suitable soil stratum. Ground movements, foundation, and plumbing can account for more than 60% of CO2 emissions in the construction of low-energy terraced houses (Gonzalez and García Navarro, 2006
). Moreover, foundation emissions are released over much shorter * Corresponding author. time spans when compared with the construction of the whole structure (Sandanayake et al., 2016). Unfortunately, environmental purposes are rarely taken into account in designing foundations (Ondova and Estokova, 2016), leaving much scope for improvement (Rose Inman and Houlihan Wiberg, 2015). Consequently, there is a need for approaches that will optimize resource consumption and reduce the environmental impacts of foundations to minimize the impact of the building stock.