Building insulating materials from agricultural by-products: A review

Construction is one of the sectors with the higher CO2 emissions. To evaluate the building environmental impacts, it is necessary to consider all the life cycle phases: from the extraction of raw materials to their disposal. In the last years, the improvement in building energy efficiency has increased the energy savings during the operational phase, without reducing the impacts in the material production. For this purpose, several researches showed that natural materials are comparable to commercial synthetic products in terms of thermal and acoustic performance. In particular, agricultural by-products, used as building thermal insulation, allow positive impact on CO2 emissions. The general aim of this review paper is to find solutions to minimize the energy consumption during building construction, in both raw material extraction and transportation. In particular, this paper carried out a literature review on the use of agricultural waste materials as thermal insulators. The construction technique and the binder type to create panels were assessed, providing a critical analysis on the future perspective in this sector.