Sustainable indicators for resources and energy in building construction

Resources and energy indicators adapted to the building sector are developed in this study. Actually, sand and gravel seems to be abundant on Earth, but this is the accessibility to these resources that is scarce on a specific territory and these materials are not transported over long distances. In this study, different options to highlight this specificity are tested, and a new way of calculation the abiotic depletion indicator is presented, based on the ratio between importation and production of resources on a specific territory. Concerning the energy, it has been shown that the energy demand is redundant when added to global warming indicator. In this study, a dynamic approach is proposed which integrate a power comparison rather than an energy one. This method is applied to houses and permits to highlight the dependence at the different step of the life cycle of a building to high power energy sources.