LCC evaluation of building components including environmental impacts

Economics in sustainable assessment is a very significant topic . Many times, in the building sector, contractors, owners and designers are at issue over the cost of sustainable projects . A variety methods are risen in the two last decades in order to include the social and environmental costs and benefits into economic evaluations . The aim of this paper is to show the results connected to a study for a new assessment model based on the integration of LCA and LCC, called €CO (Politecnico di Torino, Thiebat, 2009) . Different methods, get from published international researches, have been applied to evaluate the same building envelopes in order to validate and verify the outcome of €CO model . Methods here represented and implemented are based either on the monetization of externalities, as the European ExternE Project and the Swedish EPS method, or on scientific studies that take into account environmental and health impacts without weighting them, such as SETAC Environmental LCC and CES Selector, the methodology developed by Prof Mike Ashby (Cambridge University) . Moreover, a further effort to validate the results is the application of the Emission Trading (EU Dir . 2003/87/CE), market-based approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants . In other words, the research tries to shift this approach to the construction market applying the Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MAC), that is the cost of eliminating an additional unit of pollution . In conclusion, comparing the results obtained through €CO model with the methods above described, it is possible to affirm that the scale of values is substantially unaltered.