Materials and Process Selection Publications

Abstracts

Materials Selection in a eco-industrial park for an environmentally-conscious design

B De Benedetti, Politecnico di Torino; S. Rollino, Politecnico di Torino;
G. L. Baldo, Life Cycle Engineering, Torino; F. Rutter, Granta Design Ltd.

A project financed by the European Commission (CRAFT 1999-70125; 2001-2003) has as its objective the design of an Eco-Industrial Park (EIP) situated in a rural area in the North-West of Italy. Politecnico di Torino is one of the partners in the consortium and is charged with developing the analysis of the production processes of all materials involved in the construction of the campus with a LCA perspective, and classifying materials and design solutions from an eco-efficiency point of view. A first result of this stage is the availability of environmental life-cycle information about all materials which the designer of the campus intends to use. The LCA model of all technical solutions for campus construction is then used for the simulation step to provide the designer with a set of alternatives which have a lower impact to the environment.

The use of the Cambridge Engineering Selector (CES) software allows automation of this approach: CES is a toolkit for the evaluation and selection of materials and processes for engineering design developed at Cambridge University and Granta Design Ltd. (UK) to which LCA information has now been added to provide the designer with a standardised and automatic tool to select materials and processes on the basis of both technical and environmental properties.

In this paper these first steps of the project will be presented as well as preliminary results and next stages of the activity.