Tecnologie appropriate e innovative per la sostenibilità: applicazione ad un caso studio

The environmental impact is a major issue in the economic development of the construction industry, which is one of the most polluting production sectors. Buildings have a high environmental impact during all stages of life: they produce a lot of waste, are highly energy-demanding and consume huge quantities of raw materials and natural resources. Since the use of non-renewable resources is universally considered unsustainable and can cause irreparable damage to the environment, to safeguard the planet and our own civilization it is necessary to develop alternative strategies, both for new buildings and for renovations. In this logic, the EU is committed to supporting an intense applied research activity toward sustainability. This has resulted in numerous patents claiming among their key features a high sustainability rate. The present research wants to evaluate the increase in sustainability that some of these recently developed technologies are able to produce when used in retrofit operations of an existing building. The assessment was made with reference to the sustainability index according to the ITACA Protocol, calculated in four different scenarios, S0 to S4, in which S0 corresponds to the current conditions and the scenarios S1 to S4 to the hypothetical application of three selected innovative technologies for sustainability with a progressive increase in the degree of invasiveness of the intervention. The research highlights that innovative technologies, even resulting from the most advanced research activity, must be used critically, evaluating their costs and benefits on a case-by-case basis, in relation to the characteristics of the building being worked on.