Comparison of energy and environmental labels of a refurbished building in Southern Italy

The civil sector is the most energy-intensive in Europe and buildings play a key role in achieving the EU's ambition to become the world's first fully decarbonised continent by 2050. Designers and engineers focus their efforts on finding sustainable and resilient solutions for building envelopes and HVAC systems. The improvement of the energy label in Italy, through a standard or semi-steady-state method, is the first necessary step to make existing buildings more efficient and bring them to the nZEB standard. As part of this strategy, it may soon be necessary to extend the system boundaries and consider other phases of a building's life cycle, beyond the operational one. Solutions adopted to minimize operational carbon dioxide emissions must not lead to an uncontrolled increase in embodied emissions from building materials and systems adopted in the energy retrofit scenarios. Based on the critical issues just described, this paper proposes a life cycle analysis (LCA) according to the EN 15978 standard, on a real residential building in southern Italy undergoing energy requalification. The results obtained are compared with those deriving from the energy analysis in terms of economic indices, social cost of carbon, energy performance, energy label and embodied benchmark.