A Holistic Approach to a Sustainable Steel Building

Abstract

Impacts of production, operation and use of a building on the environment and society cannot be ignored in design any more. Instead, performance and impacts of a building needs to be considered for a lifetime, established by design rules 50-100 years. Steel, as constructional material, plays an important role as a component for buildings and engineered structures, with a wide range of applications. Like other industrial activities, steel industry works continuously to improve in terms of sustainability. In fact, in can be observed that in the last decades, the steel frames houses, as an alternative to houses made of traditional materials, offers a lot of advantages in terms of sustainability. The approach in term of a life cycle for a building is an objective process for the evaluation of the impact on the environment, associate to a production process or to an activity. These approaches are recommended by the Integrated Product Policy (COM2003) for the evaluation of the potential impact of the products In present, there are 2 majors categories instruments for the evaluation of the built environment, on one hand made on qualitative instruments based on criteria and score, and on the other hand instruments that use an quantitative analyze of the inputs and outputs based on a life cycle. Some of these methods are used for the certification of buildings as “green-buildings”. Even many parameters are usually quantitative; they can be also qualitative in the same time, when we try to quantify the advantages due to materials.