EVALUATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL INDICATORS OF BUILDING MATERIALS AND RESULTS IMPLEMENTATION TO BUILDING ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

The buildings are long-term investments associated with large environmental impacts over a long duration. The building construction and operation are known to be significant consumer of non renewable energy, contributor to greenhouse gases, waste and other environmental impacts across the world. The development towards sustainability has increased the importance of environmental footprint reduction as design decision criterion. Environmental building assessment tools are most useful during the design stage when any impairment for the pre-design criteria may be assessed and incorporated at the final stage of design development. Incorporating environmental issues such as resource consumption (of energy, land, water and materials), environmental loading, indoor comfort and longevity can help to reduce environmental impacts during entire life cycle of building. The future direction for building design is more responsible attitude and more environmentally friendly practices. The paper deals with evaluation of buildings according to the building environmental assessment tool (BEAS) developed in Slovakia. The selection of building materials for structures has significant share of total environmental performance of building and the potential of improvement is analyzed in this paper. By evaluating of large quantity of different material compositions of conventional and alternative environmental suitable structures of building envelope were determined criteria for particular levels of achieving of sustainability, applied in the BEAS.