Matching safety and sustainability: the SAFESUST approach

Abstract

The construction industry, as a main energy consumer and a foremost contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, has been undergoing a “green revolution” in the recent years. Sustainability has become a prominent issue, and environmental methods such as footprint schemes and Life Cycle Analysis approaches are being considered in the design and in the rehabilitation of buildings. However, all environmental assessment methods are applied at a later design stage, to provide a final indication of the life cycle environmental performance. A more effective way would be to consider the environmental issues in the early design stage, along with structural reliability and safety, and the global performance indicator should be expressed in economic terms. The need for an integrated design approach, to tackle safety and sustainability together has been the object of a recent workshop, in which the acronym SAFESUST was introduced. SAFESUST is an acronym to mean SAFEty and SUSTainability. It also identifies a research work-package on impact of sustainability and energy efficiency requirements on building design and retrofit, being conducted by the European Commission - Joint Research Centre, as a part of the project Safe and Cleaner Technologies for Construction and Buildings. The SAFESUST approach has been implemented into a Sustainable Structural Design (SSD) method, which considers both environmental and structural parameters in a life cycle perspective. The integration of environmental data in the structural performance is the focus of the method. Structural performances are considered in a probabilistic approach, through the introduction of a simplified Performance Based Assessment method.