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Since people tend to spend more and more time visiting museums, more accurate requirements are needed for the indoor environmental conditions of these confined spaces where two primary requisites coincide in defining their optimal indoor microclimate: the need for the appropriate artwork preservation and suitable levels of indoor comfort conditions for people visiting the exhibition buildings and/or working there. Regrettably, people and artwork requirements are sometimes characterized by different reference limits of the environmental parameters that, not rarely, could potentially conflict. Another important point to consider is that museums hosted by heritage buildings (particularly in Mediterranean climates, as is often the case in Italy) are often not equipped with climatization systems because of difficulty in installing generally bulky equipment such as HVAC systems. This circumstance represents another important limit for achieving suitable conditions for the two requisites. In addition, the recent pandemic-related occurrences are pushing technicians and designers to rethink the criteria for controlling the microclimate of public buildings, and museums among them. In this paper, this issue is addressed by reviewing current regulations, standards, and handbooks (and by means of a real case example related to the Italian context) in order to ascertain whether such documentation could facilitate the development of effective rules/guidelines for proper management of indoor parameters in museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green roofs are increasingly being used in urban settings because of the many benefits they are capable of providing. Because of their widespread use, the issue of how to conduct proper disposal of green roofs once they have reached their end of life is beginning to be raised. The present study is a review of the scientific literature published between 2007 and 2022. Specifically, the contribution of this review study is to clarify whether a waste scenario exists and if so, identify the methodological frameworks and/or criteria used in green roof-related studies to establish the end-of-life scenario of a given green roof, which will then be used to analyze its environmental and economic performance. The literature analysis indicated that a standardized method, widely adopted, which allows identifying recovery and/or disposal treatments to be assigned to waste from the disposal of a green roof, is missing. In general, the feeling one gets from reading all these articles is that when it comes to the end of life of green roofs, everything is rather vague, and that one proceeds in no particular order. The main results of the study are a collection of the criteria currently proposed in the literature to identify the end-of-life scenario of green roofs. These essentially include predominant waste management practices in place in the country where the green roof is located, safety sheets of products constituting single layers of the green roof, and statistical data on the management of specific types of waste. The results also include an overview of the current body of knowledge related to the management of the end-of-life of these building components. This study also intends to serve as a starting point for opening a debate on the disposal of green roofs, a current hot topic and still open as it has not yet been codified. Finally, some recommendations for future research work in this field are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The management of municipal solid waste is a crucial issue to address as we move toward the decarbonization of urban contexts. Not by chance, this sector plays a relevant role in the Covenant of Mayors program, whereby municipalities are called to design their own Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SECAPs). However, despite new regulations strongly pushing the recycling and reuse of materials contained in municipal waste, many cities still use large landfills. As part of the overall environmental pressure exerted by these urban systems, the transport of waste from collection points to landfills or treatment facilities must be considered in order to correctly assess the full environmental burden of waste management. To this aim, in this paper, the Ecological Footprint method is applied to the municipal solid waste management system of the city of Palermo (Sicily). The results show that the impacts produced by the means of transport used, both in the status quo and in the assumed enhanced scenario (with less municipal waste disposed to landfills in favor of recycling), are significant compared to those caused by the other segments of the waste management system. The concept of a "saved footprint" is also introduced here, in order to properly compare the two scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism represents an important economic driver in Italy, being responsible for approximately 13.2% of the total GDP (a value higher than the reference European average) and for nearly 10% of the regional GDP. Among the touristic sectors, the agritourist ones show a persistent growth, experiencing in 2019 a 6.7 point percentage improvement compared to the 2017 figures. Given this situation, the transition towards a low-carbon path, affecting the building sector for some time, should also involve agritourist buildings, through the release of EU directives, member state laws, and technical rules. On the other hand, agritourism sites could be awarded the Community EU Ecolabel. Unfortunately, awarding the EU environmental excellence brand implies the availability of several data on building energy behavior that should then be managed by complex evaluation tools. To overcome this issue, the use of the simplified ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy Networks and Environment) technical datasheets, issued to assess environmental improvements consequent to energy efficiency interventions in the urban residential building stock, is proposed. The application of this tool totally avoids using building computer-based simulation models, thus facilitating the preparation of the EU Ecolabel request documentation by agritourism owners. Being awarded the Community EU Ecolabel also implies approaching a net zero energy condition because of a lower energy consumption and a minor recourse to fossil fuels. For this purpose, an application of an easy graphical method, previously developed for residential and commercial buildings, which visually represents improvements achievable by a given agritourism when implementing energy efficiency measures, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the line of pursuing better energy efficiency in human activities that would result in a more sustainable utilization of resources, the building sector plays a relevant role, being responsible for almost 40% of both energy consumption and the release of pollutant substances in the atmosphere. For this purpose, techniques aimed at improving the energy performances of buildings' envelopes are of paramount importance. Among them, green roofs are becoming increasingly popular due to their capability of reducing the (electric) energy needs for (summer) climatization of buildings, hence also positively affecting the indoor comfort levels for the occupants. Clearly, reliable tools for the modelling of these envelope components are needed, requiring the availability of suitable field data. Starting with the results of a case study designed to estimate how the adoption of green roofs on a Sicilian building could positively affect its energy performance, this paper shows the impact of this technology on indoor comfort and energy consumption, as well as on the reduction of direct and indirect CO2 emissions related to the climatization of the building. Specifically, the ceiling surface temperatures of some rooms located underneath six different types of green roofs were monitored. Subsequently, the obtained data were used as input for one of the most widely used simulation models, i.e., EnergyPlus, to evaluate the indoor comfort levels and the achievable energy demand savings of the building involved. From these field analyses, green roofs were shown to contribute to the mitigation of the indoor air temperatures, thus producing an improvement of the comfort conditions, especially in summer conditions, despite some worsening during transition periods seeming to arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an increasing public interest in issues related to energy saving and environmental pollution reduction in the building sector. As a result, many directives have been issued, the most important being the Directive 2010/31/EU (EPBD Recast) on the energy performance of buildings, which requires that "Member States shall ensure that by 31 December 2020 all new buildings are nearly zero-energy buildings". This goal can be obtained not only by reducing energy demand for heating and cooling, but also, for example, by improving building envelope performances. In this work, a first analysis of the thermal and structural behaviour of a biocomposite material, constituted by a natural resin (rosin) and vegetal fibres (hay), has been performed, with particular attention to the share of fibres and the granulometry in the mixture. The biocomposite has shown both good insulation properties and mechanical resistance. However, the results show that further analyses should be performed on the optimisation of the samples' preparation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simplified version of the ecological footprint method is proposed for assessing the environmental performances of urban transportation systems. The method, starting from the knowledge of the composition of the running vehicular fleet, is here applied to a southern Italian province. It represents a synthetic indicator of the environmental pressure exerted by the system also matching the pollutant emissions with the carrying capacity of the site. Particularly, the forested area needed to absorb the CO2 emissions of the system is compared with the total forested area of the province. The results of the case-study indicates the yearly maximum distance that each vehicle of the fleet can cover in order for their emissions to be absorbed by the surrounding forested area. Specifically, if all cars of the fleet would travel for 10,000 km/year, 97% of the forested area would be involved. Thanks to its features, this indicator can be usefully adopted for ranking different transportation options. Therefore, it could allow local administrations to environmentally hierarchize alternative plans concerning urban transportation choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, energy efficiency and sustainability are the fulcra of building policies. These policies promote the use of new technologies and materials that can reduce the primary energy involved and the environmental costs of construction, guarantying at the same time a high level of comfort for the building's occupants. Synergy between previous construction techniques and the use of new materials should be pursued by employing materials with a low environmental impact and optimal thermal insulation properties. Within this framework, new materials derived from the agriculture sector, and waste or recycling products from the industrial/agricultural sectors have been studied. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this field by analysing the insulation properties of new environmentally friendly materials composited from waste or vegetal products for their applications within the construction sector. Measurements of the thermal conductivity of nine different samples are carried out, obtaining promising results suggesting that these products can be used as feasible alternatives to the materials traditionally used for construction and insulation. However, further analyses are certainly recommended, to assess the samples' structural properties and the influence of pre-treatments on the samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]