Abstract
Environmental considerations have called for new developments in building technologies to bridge the gap between this need for lower impacts on the environment and ever increasing comfort. These developments were generally directed at the reduction of the energy consumption during operations. While this was indeed a mandatory first step, complete environmental life cycle analysis raises new questions. For instance, for a typical low thermal energy consumption building, the embodied energy of construction materials now becomes an important component of the environmental footprint. In addition, the usual practice in life cycle analysis now appears to call for some adaptation—due to variable parameters in time—to be implemented successfully in building analysis. These issues bring new challenges to reach the goal of integrated design, construction, commissioning, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning of sustainable buildings.
Highlights
Sustainable development as defined in Brundtland‘s report [1], is a ―development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs‖.Today, climate change and resources scarcity, combine with this need to have an ever ―growing‖economy threaten our ability to reach this goal.1.1
Notwithstanding the relevance and importance of those policies, they all focus on the energy consumption through the usage phase, while the building is in operation
Hernandez and Kenny [58] extended the idea of a net-zero energy building to the life cycle zero-energy building (LC-zero energy buildings (ZEB))
Summary
Sustainable development as defined in Brundtland‘s report [1], is a ―development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs‖. Climate change and resources scarcity, combine with this need to have an ever ―growing‖. Economy threaten our ability to reach this goal
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