Life cycle assessment of building materials: A comparison by electre methodology

There is a growing awareness that in selection of building materials the designer must also consider environmnental impacts, either in global and local scale. Unfortunately, design community has an inadequate knowledge about the factors that affects environmental consequences of producing and operating buidings. To increase understanding on selection criteria and comparison of building alternatives in an “energy and environmental point of view”, is a significant goal for restraining gloabl enevironmental degradation. An interesting approach for assessing comparable products is the so called “multicriteria decision making”, but there is much debate about aggregation of criteria and weights attribution processes. This paper presents a practical framework for life cycle assessment of building materials and shows a comparative evaluation of the energy and environmental performances of two replaceable types of non load bearing wall (brick vs. concrete pumice-stone).