Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of buildings applied on an Italian context

The present study is focused on the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in the design of residential buildings, in the Italian context. The aim of the analysis is to use LCA as a tool to compare design choices (for structures, envelope technologies, building services etc.) in term of environmental impacts. Three different buildings, in different geographical localization but in a similar climate, characterized by different size, structure, and material used, were analyzed. The case studies focused their attention on the same environmental impacts: i) the embodied energy of the building materials, ii) the energy consumption of the operating phase and iii) the CO2- equivalent emissions in the atmosphere during both phases. Transports, the energy involved during the construction operations, materials used to produce the components of the building services, maintenance operations, end of life (reuse or recycling) and disposal of the whole buildings, have not been analyzed, because of the lack of reliable primary data, either from each specific case or from databases. The cases considered faced some different aspects connected to the LCA of buildings: – Case study A analyzed a residential building realized in L’Aquila, after 2009 earthquake, made with prefabricated wood panels. The real building was compared with two traditional alternatives: loadbearing masonry and concrete frame. The analysis took into account both construction and operation phases of the three alternatives with the following databases: IBO (based on Austrian context), ICE (UK context), ITACA (Italian context); – Case study B focused on two other residential buildings realized in L’Aquila with steel and prefabricated concrete technologies, following Case study A guideline; – Case study C focused on a Class A residential house built near Milan in the same period. In this case, the building life have been analyzed on wider boundary conditions, i.e. including average value of transports, construction site energy consumption and maintenance phases. A direct comparison of these cases was possible due to the similarity of the boundary conditions or to the adaptation of the existing boundaries condition to the most restrictive ones. Also, the choice of applying the same databases (i.e. IBO, ICE and ITACA) to the three case studies considered made the comparison possible, under the known hypothesis that each database was built to respond to the production system and the energetic context of the country selected as reference and accordingly to the most applied technologies in the area. As common baseline, the operational phase was found to have the highest environmental impacts, even when a significant reduction of the operation energy needs was reached by improving thermal insulation, air-tightness and ventilation heat recovery to a standard A-class value. Due to the various possible applications of Life Cycle Assessment in the building sector, it would be highly desirable and useful for nowadays designer to have a univocal tool to support the design since the early phases of the building scheme, in order to reach the optimization of the process, starting from the choice of materials to the best suitable plants