A comprehensive understanding of the environmental impacts of buildings is not possible without knowledge of the technical and environmental properties of the materials that are used for their construction. This paper evaluates the environmental impacts of 156 material variations of conventional compositions of external bearing walls, which represent a significant part of a building’s envelope. Environmental (embodied energy, global warming potential, effects to human health, damage to ecosystems, and resources availability) and technical (surface temperature, number of layers, thickness, and weight) parameters are investigated for structures with similar heat transfer coefficients (U = 0.21–0.22 W/(m2·K)). Based on a multi-criteria analysis, an optimal material composition, consisting of aerated concrete with graphite polystyrene, was identified. By analyzing the costs of the best material compositions, it is observed that constructions with environmental benefits do not result in an increase in the cost of the construction. On the contrary, at present, they represent an approximately 10% cheaper solution.

Building materials and constructions pose a serious impact on the environment. Applying assessment tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA), it is possible to determine the environmental characteristics of materials, specific constructions or whole buildings. Today, however, there is a large amount of software that is freely available or bound by a license agreement. This paper is aimed at on comparison of the two different LCA software to evaluate the impacts of the selected construction: freely available software and software fixed by a license agreement. The comparison within the mandatory boundaries from cradle-to–gate includes the main environmental impacts such as climate changes, acidification, and embodied energy. The findings revealed that the results for the environmental parameters of constructions differ significantly regarding some structures, even though the input database was the same.

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The assessment of environmental properties of buildings is now commonly using a life cycle analysis (LCA). Due to the rapidly evolving construction industry, LCA research is carried out in many areas, from building materials and components to overall building system. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool used to compare environmental impacts along the life cycle of products or services. This paper presents an evaluation and comparing of two external bearing walls of different material compositions regarding the materials´ total energy consumption within the cradle to gate boundaries. Impact categories were calculated by the software SimaPro using Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) method and applying the Ecoinvent database. A renewable (biomass, wind, solar, geothermal, water) and non-renewable (fossil, nuclear, biomass) energies were under consideration. The composition with brick as a core wall material achieved worse results in all categories than the wall composition with aerated concrete block.