The newly revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive extends the evaluation of the energy performance of buildings to the entire life cycle. This means evaluating the embodied carbon of buildings, in addition to just the operational carbon covered by it to date. Windows typically account for 10–25% of the exposed area of buildings, resulting in more than 60% of its total energy loss. Due to the key role of windows in the performance of buildings over the whole life cycle, the evaluation of their environmental impacts through recognized and robust environmental methods should become part of building design practice. However, there are limited studies examining the embodied impacts of different types of windows with a life cycle approach. Furthermore, the majority of them focus on the upfront carbon, oversimplifying the end-of-life possibilities, often assuming incineration as the only available scenario. To support studies with a broader scope and a more accurate approach to end-of-life, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method, developed by the European Commission, considers the whole life cycle of products and introduces the Circular Footprint Formula (CFF), a dedicated approach to model the end-of-life of products as well as their recycled content. The use of the CFF can support the assessment and comparison of circular economy actions, because it defines rules to model the use of secondary raw materials and of different end-of-life scenarios, including recycling, reuse, incineration (with electricity and heat recovery), and disposal, for both open- and closed-loop systems, in a consistent and reproducible way. Furthermore, LCA underpins PEF and is a pivotal method to support policy on transition to a circular economy design and the realization of respective SDGs (7, 9, 12 and 13). In June 2018, the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security launched the Made Green in Italy, a voluntary scheme that adopts the PEF method to evaluate and communicate the environmental impact of Made in Italy products. Between 2019 and 2023, the LIFE MAGIS project, co-funded by the LIFE Programme of the European Union, tested PEF and Made Green in Italy on a number of Italian product categories. This study presents the experience gained during the project working on the category of wooden windows, in particular highlighting the questions to ask and the choices to make when applying the CFF. Despite the limitations posed by the lack of an official PEFCR, also reflected in the lack of some application-specific parameters in Annex C, the experience proved that the application of the CFF to wooden windows can be a good method to assess the environmental implication of different EoL scenarios, including the implementation of CE actions. For example, for the wooden window and door sector, the growing recycling of materials such as wood and glass can be captured by the formula with higher values to be assigned to R1 while the higher recycled content, for example for glass, will be reflected by higher R2 values. This can help drive the sector towards more circular options, by recognizing and valorizing the efforts to reduce the use of virgin resources and to find alternative end-of-life options to landfill and incineration. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

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