Due to our increasing dependence on resources and energy, climate change is among the most tangible issues we are facing today. The construction industry has been identified as a key sector to intervene in, but mitigation strategies must focus on more than just operational energy. As current climate policies recommend, designers should consider the broader framework of environmental impacts characterizing the entire building lifecycle. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) considers the mentioned aspects. Nevertheless, the complexity of LCA and the criticalities of related tools prevent the application of the approach during decisive early stages. Additionally, LCA allows the estimation of environmental issues, but fails to describe other dimensions of sustainability. The article proposes an evaluation method to support decision-making during the design of sustainable buildings. The method exploits the LCA tool and the assessment framework provided by a Green Sustainable Building Certification (Active House) integrated with BIM. The approach was applied and proven through a case study: a residential single-family building in northern Italy, comparing two technological options. The study confirmed the effectiveness of the multicriteria evaluation framework that, from the early design stage, can be used to measure the environmental impact of buildings alongside implications for the final users’ comfort.

Sustainability is increasingly prioritized in infrastructure design; however, its integration into the conceptual design phase remains limited, particularly for pedestrian bridges, where structural performance plays a critical role. While existing frameworks address environmental and economic impacts in later stages, they typically fail to incorporate structural performance and sustainability holistically at the outset. To address this gap, this study introduces a quantitative decision-support framework tailored for the conceptual design of footbridges. The methodology integrates five key indicators, Global Warming Potential (GI), Total Cost (TC), Robustness (RO), Inspection (IN), and Maintenance (MA), using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach, specifically the Weighted Sum Model (WSM), supported by Pearson correlation analysis, to identify trade-offs and interdependencies among metrics. The framework is tested on two real-world case studies involving steel pedestrian bridges in different urban contexts. The results reveal a strong correlation between inspection and maintenance, suggesting that designs optimized for inspection accessibility can significantly reduce life cycle maintenance efforts and costs. Robustness appears to be largely independent from environmental impact, indicating the potential to improve structural resilience without compromising sustainability. Furthermore, cost–sustainability relationships are shown to be highly context-dependent. The practical implications of these findings are substantial: by offering a structured, data-driven tool for early-stage evaluation, the framework enables engineers, urban planners, and policymakers to make informed design choices that align with long-term sustainability goals. It offers a methodological basis for comparing design options based on quantifiable sustainability and structural metrics, contributing to evidence-based decision making in line with evolving standards for sustainable infrastructure.

The Construction sector is one of the main contributors to climate change and resource scarcity we face today. The transition towards Circular Economy (CE) models, and its interpretation at the building level with the Circular Building (CB) idea, represents a possible solution. Unfortunately, previous research has reported the lack of a uniform and well-established performance assessment scheme to define and measure CBs. Considering the potential for impact during design decision-making, this study estimates opportunities for integrating circularity principles into the building design process and, on that basis, defines the groundwork for the future development of a meta-protocol supporting the planning of efficient and sustainable CBs. The paper presents the underlying framework and base structure of the in-progress tool by reviewing existing Sustainable Building Rating Systems’ (SBRSs) integration of CE principles and analyzing developed metrics for practical circularity assessment in the Construction sector.

The integration of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as structured data within Building Information Modelling (BIM) workflows for Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and design and maintenance decision-making remains constrained. Key barriers include data heterogeneity among EPD programme operators and persistent interoperability gaps between BIM environments and dedicated LCA tools. Consequently, environmental evidence is often disconnected from the decision-making workflow. This study proposes a BIM-integrated framework for evaluating maintenance and replacement strategies for building components against environmental and economic criteria. EPD data retrieved from ECO Platform and ÖKOBAUDAT are normalised to canonical reference units, mapped onto a Data Template compliant with ISO 22057:2022, and written automatically into the information model as explicit, traceable parameters. Operational demand is obtained through dynamic energy simulation. The results are represented through cumulative impact trajectories and element-level colour coding. Six maintenance and retrofit scenarios for the building envelope were compared over a 60-year period for an existing office building in Lugano, Switzerland. The global retrofit achieves the greatest reduction in total life-cycle carbon 26.7%, while the combination of external wall insulation and window replacement reaches 18.7%. External wall insulation alone provides the most favourable balance between carbon savings and cost, with a 16.6% reduction and a 6-year carbon payback.

Government authorities can play a key role in promoting CE through public procurement, which can help scale resource-efficient strategies in the construction sector. However, they often lack knowledge of circular construction practices, especially about the context potential for urban mining and associated practicable metabolic processes. Therefore, an approach combining pre-demolition and reuse audit models is proposed to evaluate public-owned built assets at the end of their life cycle and suggest CE-oriented compensation measures to be implemented in subsequent construction projects. The paper also presents the results of applying the method to a case study in Lugano: the Ex-Spohr complex. The study identified 56 reusable elements and estimated the outgoing material flows from a hypothetical selective demolition, suggesting offsetting measures achievable in the following municipality projects.