Environmental awarding criteria in Italian tenders for building works

In Italian building tenders, the number of awarding environmental criteria is increasing. This gets out from a wide spread green sensitivity, but on the other side it could act as an opaque “green” screen on the decision process: the more the environmental require-ments are heavy awarded in the calls for bids, the more it is important their effectiveness instead of their standardization. Otherwise they work as a decision justifying factor instead of a local tailored and valuable contribution to a better environment. We investigated the use of standard environment assessments in building tenders and their effective impact on the building environmental performance in local conditions. We found out some awarding criteria listed by the generally accepted environmental protocols are not of the “fit-all” kind and should be rewritten considering the very local conditions, such as occupants’ behavior, local day-by-day climate, existing public net-works of any kind. For example, in some cases, air to water heat pumps have high green ratings on their data sheets but poor performances in cold and foggy days; a shopping mall bicycle parking is of doubtable effectiveness without a neighborhood cycle lane network, despite well awarded by green protocols and so on. We are confident our findings could improve in the next future the accuracy of “green awards” in tenders (and thus the effectiveness of environmental friendly buildings) through a better and more conscious decisional process.