In recent years, integrated building design practices based on the definition of "green building" criteria as common standards of measurement have been promoted. For example, Green Building Rating Systems such as LEED (US) and BREEAM (UK) provide national standards for developing high-performance sustainable buildings. However, integrated environmental accounting methods and global sustainability indicators are still required to evaluate the general environmental performances of buildings, because housing is greatly concerned with global environmental problems such as the use of non-renewable energy, the overexploitation of materials, the exhaustion of resources and the wasting of energy. In this work, an emergy (spelled with an "m") analysis has been applied to a building to account for the main energy and material inflows to the processes of building manufacturing, maintenance and use. Building materials, technologies and structural elements have been measured and compared to each other in order to evaluate their impacts and to provide a basic calculation that may be used for evaluation and selection. A comprehensive appraisal of the building industry is then expected through a series of synthetic indices. Results represent a source of information that will also be useful for future studies on the urban and regional scale. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.