The evaluation of sustainability performance indicators

Abstract

The sustainability concept has been progressively recognized as an important pillar in the construction industry. This yields from the intense efforts already undertaken by some countries on the creation of tools capable of its incorporation in the current approaches for design decisions. In this paper a first approach for the integration of some of these aspects in a Design Quality Assessment Method for housing buildings developed at FEUP will be presented. The proposed classification reviews two of the stages of the materials life cycle the mining and the production ones - where a comparison is performed among the diverse construction materials in terms of their embodied energy, following the established organization matrix for the assessment method. This work aims to provide procedures that allow a more careful choice of the materials, taking in consideration the needs of the upcoming generations.