Endeavours towards resource-efficient and climate friendly construction seem to be reaching their limits. The current approaches, which focus on continual reductions in heating energy consumption, are leading to increasingly elaborate insulation measures and complex air-tight buildings. Further improvements can only be realized in the scope of the building’s lifecycle. Factor X offers a pragmatic approach by reducing the consumption of non-renewable raw materials, non-renewable energy and the emission of greenhouse gases throughout the building’s entire life cycle, resulting in significant improvements in comparison with other strategies employed to date. This concept has already been put into practice in two small residential areas in Inden and Eschweiler (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), and the first positive experiences with building contractors and related companies have been gathered.
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