An attributional life cycle assessment for an Italian residential multifamily building

The study describes an attributional Life Cycle Assessment carried out accordingly to the ISO standards and focused on a typical Italian multifamily residential building. The aim was developing an exhaustive and reliable inventory of high-quality primary data for direct, indirect and avoided burdens, and comparing the potential environmental impacts along the three stages of the building life cycle. The pre-use phase takes into account the production of all the construction materials or components, their transportation, and final on-site assembling. The use-phase quantifies the resource consumptions for 50 years of the building utilization and ordinary maintenance. The end-of-life phase includes the activities of building demolition and those of management of generated wastes. The obtained results quantify how the design criteria affect the environmental performances of the analysed residential building along its life cycle. The role of pre-use phase appears remarkable, mainly in terms of global warming potential, due to the huge impacts related to steel and concrete production processes. The use phase gives the most important contributions to the overall impact, which reach 77% and 84% of the total, for the categories of global warming and non-renewable energy, respectively. The energy consumptions for the heating and air conditioning is responsible for 41% of the total global warming potential and 42% of the total non-renewable energy potential. The end-of-life phase has a rather negligible role, since the recovered resources provide only limited avoided impacts. A comparative analysis finally quantifies the improvements achievable with an alternative type of partitions and external walls.

The study describes an attributional life cycle assessment carried out according to the ISO standards and focused on an Italian multifamily residential building. The aim was developing an exhaustive and reliable inventory of high-quality primary data, comparing the environmental impacts along the three stages of the building life cycle. The pre-use phase takes into account the production of all the construction materials, transportation, and on-site assembling. The use phase quantifies the resource consumptions for 50 years of the building utilization and ordinary maintenance. The end-of-life phase includes the building demolition and the management of generated wastes. The results quantify how the design criteria affect the environmental performances of the residential building along its life cycle. The role of the pre-use phase appears remarkable for global warming potential (GWP), due to the huge impacts of steel and concrete production processes. The use phase gives the largest contributions, which reach 77% and 84% of the total, for the categories of global warming and non-renewable energy. The end-of-life phase provides limited avoided impacts. A comparative analysis quantifies the improvements achievable with an alternative type of partitions and external walls.