Building and sustainable development. GBC: a method for the environmental assessment of buildings

Abstract

The contribution of buildings to sustainable development should include as a strategic objective minimising or reducing as much as possible any negative local or global impact on the environment, and in relation to economic, social and matters by considering building processes as a whole, from beginning to end.
This is why a work group has been set up in Spain as part of the Green Building Challenge (GBC) group, whose primary goal is to develop a methodology for the environmental assessment of buildings.
The GBC method is based on a set of criteria to study data provided by the inventory of a lifecycle analysis, establishing a number of environmental-impact categories: consumption of resources, direct environmental loads, interior environment quality, quality of service, economy, operational management, and transport. Within each of these categories a set of criteria f or comparison are defined, structured on a scale of credits to be assigned according to the corresponding degree of compliance. The relative importance of some criteria compared with others is determined by jeans of a number of weighting coefficients that are assigned to each of the assessment criteria