Proposição de metodologia de avaliação do impacto ambiental no desenvolvimento de projetos arquitetônicos

Abstract

The impact of human activities over the environment, specially industrial activities, has become a growing concern in the last decades. Through this time, the ecological movement has envolved from a simple protest that called for the end of industrial activities, to the proposition of production and consumption strategies that lead to a better relation with the environment. International meetings about development and environment, such as ECO92, have established sustainable development goals to the participant countries. To achieve these goals, several methodologies of environmental impact evaluation have been developed, and those based on Life Cycle Assessment proved to be the most efficient ones, making possible to act in all the phases of this cycle. These methodologies are also very important to the evaluation of products from the Construction Industry, responsible for a large part of the material and energy consumption, and the environmental impacts generated. However , because of the huge amount of data and the multidisciplinary aspect of these methodologies, they have been problematic to be applied during the development of architectural projects in Brazil. The bibliographic review of the issues related to the construction industry, environment, and the main environment evaluation methodologies used, facilitated the proposition of a qualitative environmental evaluation methodology, that, besides being an orientation to the developer of architectural projects, also has the function of helping in the development of construction components and processes, and of generating a data bank with free access about the environmental performance of products and buildings. These results are partially confirmed by the simulation of using the methodology proposed in the evaluation of two housing projects.