Factsheet: Climate-Friendly Building Materials

EUKI project SURF supports Germany, Hungary, and Romania in promoting sustainable building renovations to achieve climate-neutral building stocks. By focusing on empowering municipal actors, the project provides tools and training to address the untapped potential for energy-efficient renovations in public buildings.

The factsheet about Climate-Friendly Building Materials highlights strategies to reduce embodied carbon in the building sector, which accounts for 36% of the EU’s energy-related emissions. It emphasises using climate-friendly materials like timber, straw, and recycled steel to cut emissions from construction and demolition stages. SURF presents a project from the corporation Ricehouse in Milan as a best practice example which showcases how rice husks and straw insulation improved social housing energy efficiency (class G to A4), cutting energy demand by over 90%. Additional benefits included roof gardens promoting biodiversity and community collaboration, demonstrating the potential of sustainable materials and co-design processes for climate-neutral buildings.

This factsheet is also available on the website of Deutsche Umwelthilfe in Romanian and Hungarian language.