Selection of Circular and Low-Carbon Building Materials

This guide by EUKI project CirCon4Climate offers strategies for reducing the construction sector’s environmental impact, emphasising the importance of sustainable building materials and introducing the Life Cycle Assessment method to evaluate their carbon footprint and environmental effects.

The goal of the work package – selection of circular and low-carbon building materials – is to evaluate global warming mitigation potential in case of using different circular and low-carbon materials in the construction sector. Activities within this work package will be conducted in the following stages. In the first stage, a list of building materials, which are supposed to be circular and have relatively low global warming potential (e.g. low carbon footprint) will be prepared. In the second stage, methods for environmental assessment of the building materials which undergo reuse/recycling will be developed, considering refurbishment of the building. Hereby methodological gaps in Life Cycle Assessment methodology will be improved. This methodology is commonly used for environmental assessment of products. In a last stage, the new method will be tested on building materials defined in the first step.

This publication is also available in Czech, Polish, and Slovenian.