Seismic performance assessment addressing sustainability and energy efficiency

Sustainability has become one of the most ambitious challenges for Europe growth, according to 2020 Europe Strategy. This high-priority theme braces a lot of industrial sectors. In particular the construction sector bears a huge responsibility in relation to sustainable development because of several impacts produced on its three dimensions: environment, economy and society. A building has to fulfill its own performance not only in the abovementioned common triple-bottom line of sustainability, but also in usability, capacity, reliability, safety and comfort. In that context, designing a sustainable construction turns out to be a very complex issue, so a holistic view is the key of sustainability in the construction sector. Furthermore, buildings should be designed and assessed in the light of time with a future in mind which can be predicted only in probabilistic terms, so an integral life-cycle approach is required. This report emphasizes the present need for the construction sector to develop a new way to conceive structures, with the aim to develop a competitive sustainable construction sector. In order to obtain this European objective a new design methodology is needed, focusing on a multi-performance, life-cycle oriented approach. A potential Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) methodology with its three main steps is presented, addressing the possibility to include environmental aspects in structural design, in order to obtain a global assessment parameter in monetary terms. In details, the building environmental analysis in terms of CO2 emissions and energy consumption, carried out by the LCA methodology, should be combined with the structural analysis. For this reason environmental results have to be transformed in costs in order to be summed with structural results, expressed in economic terms thanks to the simplified Performance Based Assessment (sPBA) methodology. Finally the importance of considering the resource-efficiency in construction sector is discussed, highlighting a possible way to measure it. The necessity to develop a research programme to consider the economic dimension of this aspect in order to include it in the SSD methodology is considered. Other possible options to ensure resource-efficiency in the construction sector through the re-use of building materials and the recycle of construction and demolition waste or the reinforcement of economic instruments are underlined.