Towards a Conscious and Far-Sighted Construction Market Through the Use of Sustainability Indexes

The ever-changing needs of the end user in the construction industry, together with the increasing awareness about the great influence of the sector on the worldwide sustainability, require some tools to be employed by the stakeholders to drive the market towards conscious and appropriate choices. An example in this regard are advanced cement-based materials that, either by partially replacing cement with supplementary cementitious materials and virgin aggregates with recycled ones or by increasing durability, are generating interest in the market thanks to their potentially better environmental performance. Therefore, besides the sustainability analyses such as the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life CycleCost (LCC) ones, some recent literature already tackled the problem proposing a more immediate evaluation approach represented by a series of indexeswhich are focused on the ecological and structural (generally, the compressive strength) performance of the material. To this end, from a comprehensive perspective, in this work two indexes are proposed able to include a wider range of environmental performances besides the costs and the durability characteristics. One is aimed to determine the suitability of using certain cementitious materials, encompassing the aforesaid parameters for the cubicmeter scale. A second one is aimed to define the bestmix design to be used to build certain structures (or components). For such purpose, the case of precast panels made with Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) is here addressed, to assess the consistency of such indexes, upgrading from the material scale to the product scale.