Building industry as the principal sector to contribute to environmental burdens is accounted for production of the substantial amount of greenhouse or acidifying gasses, as well as is responsible for consumption of massive share of energy. Although the operation of buildings is liable for almost 80-90% of life-cycle energy consumed in buildings, the other phases of life cycle also require some special attention. Even if embodied material energy in the majority of buildings represents at about 10-20%, it may be a very significant fraction especially in modem energy efficient buildings. Demands on higher standard and comfort of living has recently caused that building design has become more complicated and requires interdisciplinary cooperation of specialists from technical as well as non-technical disciplines. Selection of building materials is an important step which may influence not only amount of embodied energy or embodied CO2 and S02 emission, but also future operation (usage stage) in terms of consumed energy and released emissions of C02 and S02. In this paper, two alternatives of design of the same residential building were compared in terms of environmental performance of building materials used for building structures. Summarizing the results of the environmental evaluation the possibility to reach the reduction of embodied energy (by 16.2%), embodied C02 (by 24.6%) and S02 emissions (by 14.5%) has been proved through a simple change of material basis.
