Circular approach for deep renovation of historic building heritage. The case of a manor villa in Argelato, Bologna

Buildings are responsible for about 40% of the European energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions from energy. As stated by the European Renovation Wave, effective actions - both at the policy-legislative and academic and corporate research level – are crucial to making Europe climate-neutral by 2050. In this framework, the “DRIVE 0” European Horizon 2020 project is aimed at developing innovative solutions for energy refurbishing the existing buildings, based on a circular approach. The circular solutions developed in cooperation between universities and factories are intended to be prototyped and implemented in real pilot cases in order to test their feasibility. This paper presents the specific Italian demo case located in Argelato, constituted of a manor villa included in the “Corte Palazzo” building complex. Two different envelope solutions – a traditional ETICS system and an innovative Plug&Play solution - are applied to the building in order to compare their circularity. The results of the analyses, which consider not only the Embodied Energy and Embodied CO2, but also parameters linked to the Design for Disassembly, Materials Origin, and Re-Usability of materials and components, bring out some important reflections on the actual lack of application of a circular approach to historic buildings.