Sustainability assessment studies of recreational buildings

Abstract

Sustainability Assessment Systems (SAS) quantify the value of sustainability the buildings have become popular not only in planning a sustainable real estate development, but also in scientific research. The main weakness of these tools is a lack of financial aspects, such as Building life-cycle cost analysis (LCC); inflexibility, complexity, unsound weights of the system and natural resources and environmental evaluation criteria dominance over the social and economic problems. Given this background, recommended Lithuania’s recreational building sustainability assessment system is a modified BREEAM system which is complemented with social and economic criteria. Their importance is determined using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. Estimated Druskininkai “Snow Arena” sustainability’s value according to the modified system is 66.54%, which equals “very good” result. According to BREEAM New Construction 2011 scheme 57.80% score was reached, which also corresponded to “very good” rating. The higher rating in the modified system was due to increased social and economic criteria weights, as well as the fact that the arena well satisfied these criteria.