Sustainability assessment of an innovative lightweight building technology for partition walls - Comparison with conventional technologies

The growing necessity to save material and energy resources, together with an increasing concern over the environmental issues and uncertainties on the evolution of the economy, have impelled minimalist-approaches to Architecture and Engineering. This created a new necessity for reducing, to the minimum necessary expression, the used building materials and elements. When analysing the overall material inputs of a building, it is possible to conclude that the interior partition walls have the higher contribution to the material inputs, when compared to other non-load bearing construction elements. Other aspect to highlight is that a great portion of building designs are not flexible in use and therefore buildings are not suitably adjustable to the permanent updating of life-styles and variations on the composition of the households. Although there are some lightweight building technologies, in most cases the construction practice all over Europe makes use of heavyweight and static partition walls. This paper will focus the advantages of lightweight partition walls and may contribute for the development of new partition wall technologies. It presents a sustainability assessment of a new lightweight sandwich membrane building technology for indoor partitions developed within a research project. The used methodology comprises the environmental, functional and economic life-cycle analysis. In order to identify the advantages of the building technology under development, each different design approach for the conceptual technology will be compared with two reference technologies: i) the heavyweight conventional partition wall (hollow brick wall); and ii) the lightweight reference gypsum panels wall (plasterboard wall).