The overall classification of residential buildings: Possible role of tourist EU Ecolabel award scheme

Abstract

The debate on the environmental performance of buildings and their classification is continuously rising and deeply involves all actors of the sector, from researchers to technicians and from owners to real estate managers. In the field, the EU has created a panel that is currently working on defining the criteria for attributing an Ecolabel award to a building. However, despite the enormous efforts made by administrative and academic institutions, a suitable and widely available scheme for operators to assess the environmental performance of a building is far from being established. To help provide a solution to the problem, the possibility of adopting the EU Ecolabel scheme established for tourist facilities for the overall ranking of buildings is discussed in this work. A corresponding procedure between residential buildings and hotels is presented, along with a simple score method for ranking the buildings. The methodology can be seen as a simplified Ecolabel scheme for analysing and ranking the environmental performance of buildings. It could be used temporarily until the pending definition of a generally accepted method for analysing and ranking the environmental performance of buildings is set and could be usefully adopted by local administrations to define the impact of different policy scenarios concerning urban building parks. An application is also presented to evaluate the coherence of this proposal with those actually in use for the energy and environmental appraisal of buildings.