Towards a Conscious and Far-Sighted Construction Market Through the Use of Sustainability Indexes
Davide di Summa, Esteban Camacho, Liberato Ferrara, & Nele De Belie
Abstract: The ever-changing needs of the end user in the construction industry, together with the increasing awareness about the great influence of the sector on the worldwide sustainability, require some tools to be employed by the stakeholders to drive the market towards conscious and appropriate choices. An example in this regard are advanced cement-based materials that, either by partially replacing cement with supplementary cementitious materials and virgin aggregates with recycled ones or by increasing durability, are generating interest in the market thanks to their potentially better environmental performance. Therefore, besides the sustainability analyses such as the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) ones, some recent literature already tackled the problem proposing a more immediate evaluation approach represented by a series of indexes which are focused on the ecological and structural (generally, the compressive strength) performance of the material. To this end, from a comprehensive perspective, in this work two indexes are proposed able to include a wider range of environmental performances besides the costs and the durability characteristics. One is aimed to determine the suitability of using certain cementitious materials, encompassing the aforesaid parameters for the cubic meter scale. A second one is aimed to define the best mix design to be used to build certain structures (or components). For such purpose, the case of precast panels made with Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) is here addressed, to assess the consistency of such indexes, upgrading from the material scale to the product scale.
Reference of this article:di Summa, D., Camacho, E., Ferrara, L., De Belie, N. (2023). Towards a Conscious and Far-Sighted Construction Market Through the Use of Sustainability Indexes. In: Ilki, A., Çavunt, D., Çavunt, Y.S. (eds) Building for the Future: Durable, Sustainable, Resilient. fib Symposium 2023. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 349. Springer, Cham.
Affiliations:
Davide di Summa, and Nele De Belie: Department of Structural Engineering and Building Materials, Magnel-Vandepitte Laboratory, Ghent University, Tech Lane Ghent Science Park, Campus A, Technologiepark Zwijnaarde 60, 9052, Ghent, Belgium
Davide Di Summa,and L. Ferrara: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy
Esteban Camacho: RDC Research and Development Concretes, Calle Conde Altea 52, pta 3, 46005, València, Spain
The full article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32519-9_86