Interest in sustainable construction has been increasing due to recent events. The limitations of natural resources and the scale of global impacts, specifically as a result of the effects of global climate change, have consequences for the construction sector. These changes are giving rise to a need to reassess the way we face the built environment and rethink new solutions for construction systems or methods that contribute to mitigating negative consequences, among which we highlight the prefabrication method. This new scenario, characterised by the need to meet the decarbonisation goals set for 2050, as well as the effects of the spread of the pandemic crisis, emphasizes the importance of understanding the impacts that may occur in the construction industry, which are essentially understood as increases in sustainability, productivity, quality and, consequently, as reductions in deadlines, costs, and dependence on labour. Therefore, this entry seeks to study on the existing literature on prefabrication, seeking to gather relevant information on the new advances, challenges, and opportunities of this construction method whose approach has been mostly focused on partial or specific aspects for case studies, both highlighting the potential and identifying the gaps and opportunities of prefabrication in this new context. The prefabrication method brings benefits compared to the conventional method, and may be an alternative, as it has more positive global impacts on the environment, the economy, and society, and consequently on the sustainable development of construction, despite some limitations that have been reported and that should be looked into in the future.

The search for innovative and sustainable solutions to improve the energy efficiency of the construction industry has been a hot topic for researchers due to the tremendous impact of insulator materials in the thermal comfort of buildings. In the present work, an innovative lightweight composite material with thermal insulation properties was developed, for the first time, by using cardoon particles and polyurethane. The formulation of the composite material was optimized in terms of cardoon fraction and the polyol/isocyanate ratio, to achieve the best compromise between internal bond (IB) strength and thickness swelling (TS). The best performing composite was PU75-CP45, with 45 wt% of cardoon particles and 75% of isocyanate, achieving an IB of 0.41 MPa and a TS of 5.3%. Regarding insulation properties, the PU75-CP45 composite material exhibits a promising performance when compared to conventional construction industry materials by tuning its thickness. Additionally, the composite material presented very low emissions of volatile organic compounds and formaldehyde (bellow to legislation levels) and high resistance to biological degradation.