The Executive Council of UNI (Italian Organization for Standardization) approved the new UNI Practice Reference “Environmental sustainability in costructions- Operational tools for the assessment of sustainability” that allows to formulate a synthetic judgment on the overall performance of a building, assigning a score indicative of the level of sustainability.
The practice, also known as UNI/PdR 13:2015, has been prepared taking into account European standards on the assessment of sustainability in construction, in particular with the standards prepared by the Technical Committee CEN/TC 350.
The evaluation process defined by the practices of reference is based on the Protocol ITACA, a tool for the evaluation and certification of the level of environmental sustainability of buildings of different uses. The protocol is promoted by the Italian Regions and managed by a specific management committee that, in addition to representatives of the latter and ITACA, saw the participation of iiSBE Italia and ITC-CNR. The Protocol is based on the instrument SBTool ITACA, developed as part of the research process Green Building Challenge, coordinated by the non-profit iiSBE (International Initiatives for a Sustainable Built Environment), and chosen in 2002 as a reference by the Italian Regions .
The environmental assessment through this practice results in a score that is determined by following a process of evaluation criteria identified which refer to the following five areas: quality of the site, resource consumption, environmental loads, indoor environmental quality, quality of service.
The UNI/PdR 13:2015 is structured in two sections:
Section 0 which provides the general framework and methodological principles underlying the system of analysis for assessing the environmental sustainability of buildings for determining the performance score;
Section 1 that specifies the criteria, grouped by reference category, for the assessment of environmental sustainability and scoring performance of buildings with residential use.
The result of the calculation of the performance score is the “evaluation report”, carried out on a single building and its outdoor area of relevance, and containing the results of the evaluation with respect to the set of criteria considered.
“We are very satisfied with the result,” says Antonio Canzian, vice president of Itaca, “Having now the need to prevent further use of land, redevelop the existing building and to enhance strategic areas is extremely useful for technicians and administrators public, be able to use a tool such as the Protocol ITACA “.
“The practice of reference, which will replace the Protocol formally, I hope will soon become the reference tool for all domestic regions, so as to make homogeneous, on the whole country, the system of evaluation and certification” concluded Canzian.
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