The commitment toward energy efficiency has been taken seriously in several manufacturing sectors, specifically in the building industry. By the end of the seventies and during the early eighties, the research tackled the topic of the energy embodied in commodities and goods, the construction materials as well. In the last few years, embodied energy (EE) has gone back to be a prominent research field, due to the growing awareness that the energy initially used to produce goods and services might prevail in determining the whole amount of life-cycle energy. This is not at all surprising considering high-performance buildings as the passive houses. Here we show that the EE level of several materials is already summarized by well-known and widely available parameters, namely their production costs or market prices. The ability to explain the EE level, through market data arising from production processes, sharply increases by dividing the building materials into clusters, according to their reference industry. The results show a logarithmic relation between EE and cost. Once the EE exceeds a certain threshold the cost increases more than proportionally. Therefore, the will to make rational consumption and production decisions entails the need to consider the energy-to-cost ratio. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.