Roofing System Sustainability: A Case Study Of “Le Albere” Neighbourhood

The building and construction sector is one of the major responsible of the negative environmental impacts. Indeed, it accounts for the largest share in the use of natural resources, by land use, by materials extraction and in greenhouse gasses emissions. Nowadays, it is possible to quantify the environmental impact of buildings by using different typologies of instruments, such as rating systems and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Using rating systems allow measuring the sustainability level of whole buildings, instead the use of LCA permits to evaluate with synthetic indicators the environmental impact related to materials, products and assemblies. This paper shows the first results of a research study, which focuses on the verification and validation of a methodology for defining the sustainability of a building subassembly, integrating LCA tool with green building rating systems. The case study is the roofing system used for the buildings of “Le Albere” neighbourhood, located in Trento (Trentino Alto Adige region, Italy). Thanks to the integration of these two sustainability evaluation tools, it was possible to identify strengths and weaknesses of the adopted construction system and suggest improvements both for the assembly and single materials, in order to increase the sustainability of the elements in the future applications.