Life cycle assessment in building activities: A comparison analysis

This paper is aimed to front the problem of energy and environmental saving in building companies by adopting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool. LCA allows to define the environmental compliance of a given product or process through the analysis of its whole life cycle. In this sense LCA offers the possibility to include the mining and manufacturing of raw materials, production, transportation and distribution activities, use, possible reuse and final disposal of wastes. Building industry is actually recognized as a strong energy consumption sector with continuously rising of consumptions, where corrective actions must be adopted to enhance the environmental sustainability of final products. By assuming LCA as a suitable tool to optimize energy and environmental performances, four different thermal insulators and three case studies represented by buildings with several technological solutions have been analyzed through this tool to evaluate the environmental impacts coming from realization, use and disposal phases.