Life Cycle Assessment of Protection Products for External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems

Pedro Frazão Pedroso, José Dinis Silvestre (), Giovanni Borsoi and Inês Flores-Colen
Additional contact information
Pedro Frazão Pedroso: CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
José Dinis Silvestre: CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Giovanni Borsoi: CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
Inês Flores-Colen: CERIS, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 24, 1-18

Abstract: The energy performance and thermal comfort of buildings are decisive factors for users. Thus, solutions such as the external thermal insulation systems (ETICS) that can be installed in either new buildings or buildings under thermal retrofitting, reducing the energy consumption while improving thermal comfort, tend to become mainstream. This paper purposes to quantify the environmental and economic impacts of various ETICS protection solutions to assist in decision-making at the project phase. In this study, products available on the Portuguese market are considered. The protection products considered are hydrophobic agents, biocides, multifunctional, and self-cleaning. The products are compared by type of protection, presenting some of the most impactful components, following a multicriteria analysis of some of those products gathered into different solutions, with the objective of demonstrating the influence of the weights assigned to environmental and economic indicators. Several data-linked problems were identified, such as the quantity and quality of data available for analysis, crucial to their reliability; thus, an index for quality of information was developed in order to compare different products. In the multicriteria analysis, the weights of the sensitivity analysis between environmental and economic indicators highly influence the “best solution”; therefore, stakeholders need to clearly define their objectives.

Keywords: ETICS; life-cycle assessment (LCA); life-cycle cost (LCC); protection; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/24/16969/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/24/16969/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:24:p:16969-:d:1007068

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().