Metodo di valutazione speditiva della circolarità negli interventi di riqualificazione del patrimonio edilizio esistente. Applicazione a quattro casi di studio in Europa / Simplified method for assessing the circularity in the requalification of the existing building heritage. Application to four European case studies.

The decarbonisation of the building sector is a key issue in facing the climate crisis. The concept of circularity in the built environment is becoming more and more widespread to pursue this goal. This approach proposes the design of buildings paying particular attention to the origin of the materials and energy sources used for their manufacture and transport, as well as to their ability of assembly and disassembly to adapt to future uses and to minimise the production of construction and demolition waste. Lots of methods and tools for assessing the circularity of buildings are already available, but they are scarcely employed. One of the possible causes of the low employment of these tools lies in their complexity and difficult accessibility by stakeholders and users, in particular those not specialised in the construction sector. This reflection led to the purpose of defining a simplified method for assessing the level of circularity of buildings by evaluating the implementation of different intervention scenarios. This contribution comes up with an overview of the state of the art of European research scenarios and the currently most widespread best practices that meet the requirements of circular design. Subsequently, the methodology called “EASY – Express ASsessing tool for CircularitY”, developed by the University of Bologna in the framework of H2020 EU project “DRIVE0” is reported. This methodology is aimed at identifying a numerical index for the evaluation of the circularity level of the overall building. This latter was compared with a cradle-to-gate LCA analysis performed using the OneClick LCA Software. Finally, the paper reports the results obtained from applying this method to four case studies in Europe, for which the feasibility study has approved the implementation of volumetric additions.