Recommendations and guidelines to foster sustainable design : EFIResources: Resource Efficient Construction towards Sustainable Design

The research project EFIResources: Resource Efficient Construction towards Sustainable Design was developed in order to support European policies related to the efficient use of resources in construction. Its major goal was the development of a performance based approach for sustainable design, enabling to assess the resource efficiency throughout the complete life cycle of buildings. The proposed approach aims at the harmonization between structural design and sustainability design of buildings, to enable an easier integration of structural and sustainability criteria in the design process, thus coping with the essential requirements for construction works of the Construction Products Regulation. The development of this approach was made in different steps. The first step consisted in the development of a consistent model to assess the life cycle performance of buildings, to enable comparability and to support the quantifications of benchmarks. All buildings considered in this project were assessed based in this model. Then, a graduated approach was adopted for the development of benchmarks, starting on a simple basis and improving in accuracy over time. Two sets of benchmarks were quantified for residential and office buildings. The last step consisted in the presentation of the performance based approach for sustainable design, which is based on the definition on benchmarks to strive to a reduction of the use of resources in construction. The limit state of sustainability was introduced that aims to complement the limit states for structural performance. This last report of the project EFIResources aims to summarize the main achievements of the project but also to emphasise some limitations of the developed approach. Hence, at the end of the report, the main achievements and limitations of the proposed approach are discussed and recommendations for future research work are provided.