Environmental Profile of Building Materials of a Single Family House

A term sustainable is widely used in every branch of human activity including civil engineering. Exploitation of raw materials and natural resources, consuming of energy from non-renewable sources, air, water and soil pollution or creation of massive amounts of waste belong to serious issues of society. Each building process, including extraction of raw material, transportation, production of components, build-up, operation or demolition of buildings poses the negative environment impacts. Besides buildings operation, which is the most energy demanding phase of the life cycle and the phase with the majority of greenhouse and acidifying gasses emissions, selection of material basis is very important. Production of many materials is very non-ecological and requires huge amounts of energy, usually derived from fossil fuels. In this paper materials of a single-family house were analyzed from environmental point of view on the basis of life cycle assessment. Parameters such as amount of used material, global warming potential, acidification potential and primary energy intensity were evaluated. On first occasion the negative influence of build-up was analyzed and the environmental profile of building was created. In the assessed building, amount of primary energy intensity reached 441394.3 MJ, amount of CO2 emissions reached 34953.6 kg CO2eq and SO2 emissions reached 129.9 kg SO2eq. Subsequently, important actions, such as optimization of material base and constructional design should follow to improve the environmental profile of building in terms of used building materials