Assessing the mitigation potential of environmental impacts from sustainability strategies on steel construction value chain: a case study on two steel products in Italy

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) plays a crucial role in sustainability evaluations and impact assessments, especially in the field of environmentally and eco-friendly materials or system production and building design for the construction sector. However, stakeholders and professionals tend to use LCA mainly to develop an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) or assess building sustainability certification. This research investigates the possibility of using the LCA results to assess the potential for further mitigation of the environmental impacts on the construction industry. Starting from a previous study on the steel construction value chain performed by authors to develop two steel product datasets for the Italian LCA database, this work aims to identify how sensitivity analysis can guide industries in choosing sustainability strategies to mitigate their impacts further. The study focuses the sensitivity analyses only on one specific sustainability strategy for each of the two previously analyzed steel products (A. beams and angles and B. hollow sections), thus potentially limiting the generalizability of findings to a broader range of sustainability strategies but demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed method and its replicability to other products and production scenarios.