The overall classification of residential buildings: Possible role of tourist EU Ecolabel award scheme

The debate on the environmental performance of buildings and their classification is continuously risingand deeply involves all actors of the sector, from researchers to technicians and from owners to realestate managers. In the field, the EU has created a panel that is currently working on defining the criteriafor attributing an Ecolabel award to a building. However, despite the enormous efforts made byadministrative and academic institutions, a suitable and widely available scheme for operators to assessthe environmental performance of a building is far from being established.To help provide a solution to the problem, the possibility of adopting the EU Ecolabel schemeestablished for tourist facilities for the overall ranking of buildings is discussed in this work. A correspondingprocedure between residential buildings and hotels is presented, along with a simple scoremethod for ranking the buildings.The methodology can be seen as a simplified Ecolabel scheme for analysing and ranking the environmentalperformance of buildings. It could be used temporarily until the pending definition ofa generally accepted method for analysing and ranking the environmental performance of buildings is setand could be usefully adopted by local administrations to define the impact of different policy scenariosconcerning urban building parks. An application is also presented to evaluate the coherence of thisproposal with those actually in use for the energy and environmental appraisal of buildings.