Potentialities of lightweight construction solutions for sustainability

Abstract

The amount of waste produced every year, the exhaustion of resources and the construction solutions currently used in construction may not be sustainable in the future. All these issues lead to the research on new construction techniques, on recycling of waste into useful materials, on re-use of construction materials, etc. Most of the new and innovative solutions arise from the general feeling that something should be done to change the conventional way of construction in order to give an answer to current society concerns: the reduction of energy consumption, the minimization of pollution problems, the maximisation of the use of renewable and/or recyclable materials, etc. The aim of this study is to evaluate the potentialities of using more lightweight construction solutions with respect to functional comfort criteria (thermal, acoustic and visual comfort) and to assess the relative merits of this type of construction in view of maximising sustainability. Beyond the structural behaviour of a building, the demand of a better habitat requires also a good performance in terms of serviceability. In this work, the performance of lightweight construction solutions (optimized for reducing environmental impact) and conventional construction solutions were compared under the energy costs point of view (construction and heating). The other parameters have also been analysed but are not shown here since they were considered not relevant for this analysis.