Italian Life Cycle Assessment Database as a Strategic Tool to Support Environmental Analyses in Buildings and Construction Sector

The increasing application of life cycle approaches in the building sector highlights the need for reliable and geographically representative life cycle inventory (LCI) data. Building on previous research, this study presents the Italian LCA database (IT-LCA DB) as a national resource of geographically representative LCI data for the construction sector. Selected datasets from the IT-LCA DB were compared with corresponding ecoinvent datasets for five construction material categories: autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC), cement, concrete, glass panels and PVC frames. The methodology applied the Environmental Footprint impact assessment method and compared characterised and normalised results. For AAC, additional analyses examined process contributions and dataset modelling. Results show that the Italian AAC dataset has higher impacts in some impact categories, e.g., Ionising radiation (+149%) and Resource use, minerals and metals (+82%), but lower impacts for other ones, e.g., Water use (−83%) and Ozone depletion (−60%). Despite these differences, the most relevant impact categories and their contribution are consistent across the two datasets: e.g., Climate change accounts for 23.8% and 25.0% of total normalised impacts for the Italian and Swiss datasets, respectively. These findings show the relevance of nationally representative LCI data for their application in building LCA and Whole Life Carbon assessments.