Subsequently, to determine the influence of the construction materials, the analysis have been assessed over four main stages; energy consumption and CO2 emissions by operation during the life-cycle (60 years) of the buildings, energy consumption and CO2 emissions during the production of construction materials (initial and recurrent embodied energy and CO2 emissions), energy consumption and CO2 emissions produced by the transport of construction materials, finally, energy and CO2 emissions which could be recovered during the recycling of these materials (EoL potential). Design Builder software was used to calculate the operational energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the buildings while CES eco-audit (2011) software was used to calculate the other three stages.

The results of this thesis determined that the total embodied energy (initial and recurrent embodied energy) of construction materials is among 18 % and 32 %, the energy consumed by the transport of these materials is between 0.2 % and 0.6 %, while the operating energy consumption represents between 68 % and 82 % of the total energy consumption during the life-cycle of the buildings. Beside this, the CO2 emissions results show that the trends are practically equal to those of the energy consumption results.

On the other hand, the analysis conducted in this thesis relating to the potential of recycling construction materials, has determined that from 17 % to 63 % of the embodied energy and CO2 emissions of these materials could be reduced.

To conclude, with this analysis it was established that the construction materials represent a significant influence on the total energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the buildings subject to analysis. The difference between the buildings with lower and higher total embodied energy and CO2 (including transport) during the life-cycle of these is equivalent of 17.4 years of operating energy consumption and 17 years of operating CO2 emissions.