La sostenibilità dei materiali nel recupero dell’architettura storica. Dalla tradizione ai nuovi criteri di efficienza energetica

The construction industry accounts for 24% on total amount of raw materials used in related processes. Extraction, processing, transport and installation consume large quantities of water and energy, by producing considerable CO2 emissions. Moreover, construction and demolition waste are the 10-15% of the whole waste produced. The need to make existing buildings more efficient, has obliged the historical heritage to compare itself to a right environmental planning of materials. The 3R approach allowed to evaluate, with an innovative awareness in the choice of the various alternatives, the environmental compatibility of materials as a main factor in adaptive retrofit project through “traditional” actions such as reuse of components, recycling of historical materials and the consequent reduction of impacts. However, the reflection about the practice of reuse of materials and components and about operations of reuse of spaces, broken by industrial revolution, allows to define good interventions practices in contemporary adaptive sustainable reuse, in which conservation actions and insertion of the new ,through the Life Cycle assessment of interventions, find concordance. The recycling of materials as a reuse of the material and the recycling of the material in another material in the revitalization of the historic buildings , for the definition of the intervention’s compatibility, are the main goal of this research.