Minimum Environmental Criteria, Estimation of Costs and Regional Prices: Preliminary Considerations

Abstract

Several European Directives over the last 15 years addressed the issue of environmental sustainability towards building design process and considering the public sector this led to a regulatory transposition of some requirements in the procurement phase. The European requests in this sense are implemented in Italy also with the introduction of the Minimum Environmental Criteria (MEC) which must be preliminarily set in the feasibility study and guaranteed in the definitive and executive design phases. After a brief overview and introductions about MEC the paper proposes an evaluation based on the regional price lists where the cost estimation is linked to public works. First of all, the evaluation (rapid, intuitive, and replicable) focuses on the analysis of the regional price lists verifying the presence of MEC materials or processes and highlighting the quantity with respect to the total of the price list items. A second comparative evaluation focuses on the comparison between two types of thermal insulators (considering three national geographical areas such as north, center and south) by relating two aspects: a) the price differential between the two materials (MEC versus traditional ones); b) the relative price differential relating to the processing and installation of the same materials made to vary in quantitative terms due to the same performance response to the three different climatic zone.