Ricerc@Sapienza

The present contribution deals with an ongoing Italian research which includes several steps and it is approaching to its final stage. The main goal is analysing and testing the feasibility of municipal waste reuse for designing building envelopes for Near Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB), so as to contribute to the decreasing demand for energy and improve eco-friendly waste management in urban areas.

Global and local climate change increases the occurrence and the magnitude of extreme phenomena, as urban heat island and heat waves. These phenomena seriously affect the quality of life in several aspects: society, health, environment; they also heavily affect the building sector, increasing the energy use for cooling and deteriorating the indoor thermal environment. This paper utilizes data from a continuous urban microclimatic monitoring over three years to quantify the impact of heat waves on the thermal quality of two reference residential buildings in the city of Rome, Italy.