COMPARISON OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF TWO WOODEN BUILDINGS

Nowadays, in Italy there is particular attention to reduce the environmental impact of the building industry. The wooden building systems allow to reduce this impact, but there are more than one constructive solutions. The aim of the research was analyzing and comparing different wooden construction technologies, mainly focusing on the most diffused and establishing the environmental impact. To do this, the "Social Housing Trentino Institute" (Trento, Italy) built two social housing buildings with 14 apartment for each. The buildings have the same size, shape and destination of use, but they are characterized by two different construction systems in terms of structural resistance, energy performance and environmental impact. The two buildings have been built one with the "Timber Framed System" and the other with "Cross Laminated Timber Panel System". The evaluation of the environmental impacts of the two buildings has been performed from the Laboratory of Building Design of the University of Trento using the software SimaPro, in accordance to UNI EN ISO 14040 and UNI EN ISO 15686 standards. In order to allow the comparison, a first analysis considering the different constructive elements (walls, floors, roofs, internal partitions) have been performed in order to evaluate which is the less impacting between the two different hypothesized construction solutions but only in terms of materials. The research interest was related to know how much was the environmental impact of the each building as a whole. For this reason, in the second part of the research we considered all the life phases of the buildings. For the LCA calculation the following building life cycle phases were taken into account: building materials production, transportation, building management (Energy Process), maintenance and substitution of building components. In the paper will refer of the research final results.