Integrated system approach to evaluate social, environmental and economics impacts of buildings for users of housings

Sustainable building and/or green building strategies have been founded on two basic principles: energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. Energy efficiency attempts to serve a dual purpose, the first geopolitical - to end dependency on fossil fuel supplies from other countries - and the second to reduce energy consumption. While various methods for assessing the environmental impact of residential buildings are available and a number of certifications have been created, these certifications do not actually help home owners and users, but rather are endorsing buildings that have been constructed with no attempt at sustainability, thus making the diffusion of any sustainability criteria in construction that much more difficult. This study aims to develop a simple user-friendly tool for home owners that provides the same rigor that current sustainability certificates offer the professional builder and property developer. A sustainability appraisal is carried out based on social, environmental and economic impacts, each of which is evaluated using easily understandable parameters. The integrated system is then verified through the case study of a real residential building. The subsequent results demonstrate a better building performance when pursuing green demand in housing and also indicate the changes required for improvement. In applying this new integrated tool we are able to confirm its ease of use, along with its highly comparable results with any other evaluation tools currently available. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.