Assessment of the Sustainability of the Renovation of Multi-apartment Buildings in Residential Areas / Daugiabuciu Namu Lietuvoje Atnaujinimo Darnumo Ivertinimas

The majority of Lithuanian multi-apartment residential buildings were built before 1993. Moreover, projects of housing renovation and maintenance have not been carried out before 1996. Lack of proper maintenance led to a significant deterioration of multi-apartment buildings. Most of these buildings are neither economic, nor environmentally-friendly and consume a significant amount of heat energy. Six major construction requirements should be satisfied when designing or refurbishing a building. Sustainable renovation of multi-apartment buildings and their environment is a universally recognized problem. It is crucial to evaluate both the buildings and their surrounding environment. A proper building renovation project can be created and selected only by performing multi-criteria assessment. Therefore, this paper presents a sustainable multi-apartment building assessment method, which is applied specifically for Lithuania and could help renovate multi-apartment buildings in residential areas of Lithuanian cities more effectively. After performing the analysis of modern building sustainability assessment methods, the BREEAM method was chosen as the basis for the proposed method, specifically adapted to Lithuania. It is one of the oldest and most widely used methods used for assessment of the environmental effect of buildings. This method allows evaluating the building's utility from the ecological perspective in the following areas: management, health and wellbeing, energy, transport, water, materials, waste, land use and ecology, pollution and innovation. However, BREEAM and other similar methods cannot be used to assess the financial aspects of a building, which should be included in the analysis at all assessment stages along with the aspects of environment protection. When creating a renovation project, an important criterion is the payoff of it; therefore, the absence of financial assessment diminishes the effectiveness of the BREEAM assessment method. To address this problem, the proposed method is complemented with an additional set of economic assessment criteria. Furthermore, the BREEAM method is modified, taking into account the conditions in Lithuania and determining new significances of the criteria sets. By applying this method, specifically adapted to Lithuania, the assessment of a renovation project of a standard 47-year-old multi-apartment building was made. The assessment score was 71.77%, therefore, the renovated building satisfied the sustainability requirements and was given an “Excellent” sustainability status. The application of the assessment method adapted to Lithuania could help renovate multi-apartment buildings in residential areas of Lithuanian cities more effectively. This, in turn, could result in a higher quality of life, since the consumption of natural resources and CO₂ emission would decrease. Renewable energy sources would become more widespread and, therefore, the climatic changes would occur less often.