Sustainability Assessment of Facilities: A Comparative Analysis of Rating Scheme: Case VTT Digitalo

The building sector contributes about a third of all energy-related emissions worldwide. Taking into account the emissions caused by land-use change impacts caused by urbanization, the manufacturing of building elements and the production of building materials, the share becomes even larger. According to the World Watch Institute, if the current trend continues the entire global community will run out of raw building materials by approximately 2030. Moreover, the building sector consumes water - a scarce resource in many parts of the world - for domestic use, landscapes and cooling towers. The building sector also generates a large variety of waste in construction, operation, renovation and, finally, demolition. Consequently, finding an effective way to transform the way we plan, design, build, operate, renovate and demolish buildings in the direction of sustainable practices has been the goal of many environmental assessment tools. In addition, there are co-benefits from this effort such as decreasing air and environmental pollution, improving health and productivity, and enabling sustainable economic development by promoting new sustainable technologies and behavior. Due to rising environmental concerns many local and global assessment tools have been developed. Because of the varying perspectives of the assessment tools the weighting factors applied to the various issues differ to some extent. The aim of this study was to understand the similarities and differences between various rating schemes currently applied in our market and to analyze their relation to LCA-based assessment and the new SBA system, which is still under development. The commercial rating tools studied were BREEAM, LEED and PromisE.