The vulnerability of buildings faces further scrutiny as gaps in design, construction, operation, and maintenance remain. Although there has been noticeable progress in the field, the frequency and magnitude of building damage during natural events highlight the fact that sustainable infrastructure has not yet reached all targets. In this study, sustainability aspects of vulnerable buildings are revisited to propose more robust measures to prevent damage and a lack of functionality. Those measured are underpinned by the merging of environmental and structural sustainability for one novel integrated approach. The method devises structural intervention scenarios based on damage levels and service period. It also aims at reducing resource use and embodied impacts through the discretization of standard life cycle analysis into customized stages. The integrated method to evaluate sustainability is tested on two vulnerable buildings in Turkey and Mexico, built with different codes of practice and having experienced low to medium damage during severe earthquake events. Research findings indicate that although embodied impacts form a minor part of the building life cycle environmental impacts, sustainable structural interventions can further reduce both embodied impacts and demands on natural resources. Hence strengthening vulnerable buildings can provide an advantage to help the sustainable transformation of cities.

The frequency of disasters recorded around the globe, combined with inadequate enforcement of design codes, the natural deterioration of the existing built fabric and poor use of land due to rapid urbanisation make urban infrastructure vulnerable to experience damage. This eventually creates the need for building retrofitting, which triggers further environmental degradation. Furthermore, the lack of a well-defined approach to guarantee sustainable structural recovery derives on structural interventions focusing on strengthening elements to improve their performance only, hence ignoring the plethora of building deficiencies associated to post-disaster retrofit. The aim of this investigation is therefore to embed structural upgrading within the principles of sustainability while developing the metrics to enable structural damage reduction. This will contribute to optimising post-disaster building interventions. The proposed approach is applied to a pilot case to illustrate identified alternatives for improving the performance of otherwise vulnerable infrastructure from a life-cycle perspective.

Perlite and some recycled materials are preferably used to provide thermal insulation and lightness in mortar. Cement is often used as a binder in such a composite, although it makes the composite heavier and impairs its insulation properties. In this study, recycled bottom ash (BA) and expanded perlite (EP) as the aggregate, and cement as the binder and the optimum solution were investigated by using Taguchi Method. Depending on the specimens prepared using orthogonal array L9, the values of compressive strength, flexural strength, flowability, dry unit weight, water absorption, capillarity coefficient, and thermal conductivity coefficient were calculated. In general, it was found that the cement dosage was the most effective parameter and the thermal conductivity coefficient increased in parallel with the increase in unit weight and strength.

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