Case related Life Cycle Cost Analysis to support Façade Leasing

The building industry is an economic key driver since its involvement in environmental impacts is strongly recognized: this sector is still one of the main responsible of GHG (Greenhouse gases as CO2, CH4, N2O, etc.) emissions, in particular buildings generate approximately 40% of the CO2 emissions, thus contributing in large measure to the global warming. At the same time, another relevant contribution is in waste generation: the building sector, indeed, is responsible for almost 35% of the total waste production. The dissertation is intended to introduce the Circular Economy practices through which it will be possible to apply the principles of sustainability: the implementation of Circular Business Models in the building process may lead to opportunities in economic, environment, business and society terms. In particular, ones of the most significantly objectives of Circular Economy are the maintaining of material productivity over the entire lifecycle and the promoting of an efficient use of the raw materials. In this regard, it will be described how the Life Cycle Cost Analysis is one of the main decision-making support tool to include upstream of the design process, in order to evaluate not only the economic aspects but also the potential environmental impacts of a choice over the life cycle. In the present case, the application of the Life Cycle Cost Analysis has been a support for analysing different alternatives of façade’s refurbishment on a case study located in the Netherlands, in which it has been introduced the possibility to exploit the Circular Business Model called “Product as a service”: through the leasing it sets a new form of relationship between the supplier and the customer, in which the optimisation of the useful lifetime of a component and the integration of its end-of-life phase in the design process become central. This new ownership model, whereby the manufacture remains the owner of his product that is temporarily stored in the building, requires a greater attention to the Total Cost of Ownership: it is possible to evaluate it thanks to the Life Cycle Cost Analysis by investigating which alternative could result the most cost-effective, and then that data could be a strong base for developing an ideal scenario in which the purchasing and the leasing system are compared. This study has not the aim of providing the exact values of each cost item or the precise price at which a system could be immediately leased, since the macro-economic context is subject to variables that could change in the long period, but rather it is intended to be a methodology developed for helping to calculate the performance contracts for leasable façades.