Examining the Environmental Impacts of Materials and Buildings

Examining the Environmental Impacts of Materials and Buildings
Author: Blaine Erickson Brownell
Publisher: Engineering Science Reference
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781799824299

"This book explores the environmental impact of building design, construction, maintenance, demolition, and related activities"--

Examining the Environmental Impacts of Materials and Buildings

Examining the Environmental Impacts of Materials and Buildings
Author: Brownell, Blaine Erickson
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-02-28
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1799824284

Fundamental environmental challenges such as climate change, resource depletion, and pollution are still widely relevant in today’s world. Many of these problems have been associated with the architecture, engineering, and construction industries due to the level of resources used in these professions. In recent years, many manufacturers in these fields have expressed the motivation to make necessary changes that would be beneficial to the environment. Despite this progress, there remains a lack of research and assessment on the methods to achieve environmental stability within these architectural fields. Examining the Environmental Impacts of Materials and Buildings provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of ecological performance within modern building design and materials-based construction. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as life cycle assessment, material flows analysis, and sustainability, this book is ideally designed for architects, civil engineers, construction professionals, environmentalists, ecologists, business practitioners, scientists, policymakers, designers, researchers, and academicians seeking research on current trends in environmental performance within building design.

Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability

Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability
Author: Jiří Jaromír Klemeš
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2015-01-20
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0128022337

Assessing and Measuring Environmental Impact and Sustainability answers the question “what are the available methodologies to assess the environmental sustainability of a product, system or process?” Multiple well-known authors share their expertise in order to give a broad perspective of this issue from a chemical and environmental engineering perspective. This mathematical, quantitative book includes many case studies to assist with the practical application of environmental and sustainability methods. Readers learn how to efficiently assess and use these methods. This book summarizes all relevant environmental methodologies to assess the sustainability of a product and tools, in order to develop more green products or processes. With life cycle assessment as its main methodology, this book speaks to engineers interested in environmental impact and sustainability. Helps engineers to assess, evaluate, and measure sustainability in industry Provides workable approaches to environmental and sustainability assessment Readers learn tools to assess the sustainability of a process or product and to design it in an environmentally friendly way

Environmental Impact Assessment of Buildings

Environmental Impact Assessment of Buildings
Author: Wahidul Biswas
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020-02-05
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3039282433

This Special Issue covers a wide range of areas—including building orientation, service life, use of photocatalytically active structures and PV facades, implications of transportation system, building types (i.e., high rise, multilevel, commercial, residential), life cycle assessment, and structural engineering—that need to be considered in the environmental impact assessment of buildings, and the chapters include case studies across the globe. Consideration of these strategies would help reduce energy and material consumption, environmental emissions, and waste generation associated with all phases of a building’s life cycle. Chapter 1 demonstrates that green star concrete exhibits the same structural properties as conventional concrete in Australia. Chapter 2 showed that the use of TiO2 as a photocatalyst on the surface of construction materials with a suitable stable binding agent, such as aggregates, would enable building walls to absorb NOx from air. This study found that TiO2 has the potential to reduce ambient concentrations of NOx from areas where this pollutant becomes concentrated under solar irradiation. Chapter 3 presents the life cycle assessment of architecturally integrated glass–glass photovoltaics in building facades to find the appropriate material composition for a multicolored PV façade offering improved environmental performance. Chapter 4 shows that urban office buildings lacking appropriate orientation experienced indoor overheating. Chapter 5 details four modeling approaches that were implemented to estimate buildings’ response towards load shedding. Chapter 6 covers the life cycle GHG emissions of high-rise residential housing block to discover opportunities for environmental improvement. Chapter 7 discusses an LCA framework that took into account variation in the service life of buildings associated with the use of different types of materials. Chapter 8 presents a useful data mining algorithm to conduct life cycle asset management in residential developments built on transport systems.

Sustainable Building with Earth

Sustainable Building with Earth
Author: Horst Schroeder
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2015-09-28
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319194917

This book provides an insightful overview of the current state of earth building. The author approaches the subject from the perspective of the building material’s life cycle, featuring in-depth explanations of the cycle's individual steps: extraction and classification of construction soil; production of earth building materials and earthen structures; planning, construction and renovation of earth buildings; and demolition and recycling of earthen structures. This unique resource provides examples of sophisticated earth building projects and illustrates the diverse applications of earth as a building material. Compared to conventional mineral building materials, earth possesses particularly positive ecological qualities such as its energy balance and recyclability. Architects, engineers, students, manufacturers and distributors of building materials, building contractors, building biologists, public authorities and preservationists will benefit from this book’s ample coverage of restoring, optimizing and building with this material of the past, present and future.

Sustainable Construction Techniques

Sustainable Construction Techniques
Author: Sebastian El Khouli
Publisher:
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9783955532383

What makes building materials sustainable? How to reduce the amount of embodied energy in building constructions? And how does a Life Cycle Analysis work? These are questions which are becoming increasingly more common in the context of sustainable construction. The DETAIL Green Book "Sustainable Construction Techniques" offers a thorough guide to ecological building design and sustainable construction methods, which will be particularly valuable for architects. The authors provide an overview of the most relevant databases and certification standards for building products and illustrate how a Life Cycle Analysis is conducted. They also identify key ways of optimising the planning process in line with ecological criteria, while offering advice for the selection of building materials and elements. Detailed documentation from five buildings constructed in Europe and North America serve to illustrate the associated assessment processes in this book.

Green Building Management and Smart Automation

Green Building Management and Smart Automation
Author: Solanki, Arun
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-07-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1522597565

Throughout the world, there is an increasing demand on diminishing natural resources in the industrial, transport, commercial, and residential sectors. Of these, the residential sector uses the most energy on such needs as lighting, water heating, air conditioning, space heating, and refrigeration. This sector alone consumes one-third of the total primary energy resources available. By using green building and smart automation techniques, this demand for energy resources can be lowered. Green Building Management and Smart Automation is an essential scholarly publication that provides an in-depth analysis of design technologies for green building and highlights the smart automation technologies that help in energy conservation, along with various performance metrics that are necessary to facilitate a building to be known as a “Green Smart Building.” Featuring a range of topics such as environmental quality, energy management, and big data analytics, this book is ideal for researchers, engineers, policymakers, government officials, architects, and students.

Embodied Carbon in Buildings

Embodied Carbon in Buildings
Author: Francesco Pomponi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2018-01-28
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319727966

This book provides a single-source reference for whole life embodied impacts of buildings. The comprehensive and persuasive text, written by over 50 invited experts from across the world, offers an indispensable resource both to newcomers and to established practitioners in the field. Ultimately it provides a persuasive argument as to why embodied impacts are an essential aspect of sustainable built environments. The book is divided into four sections: measurement, including a strong emphasis on uncertainty analysis, as well as offering practical case studies of individual buildings and a comparison of materials; management, focusing in particular on the perspective of designers and contractors; mitigation, which identifies some specific design strategies as well as challenges; and finally global approaches, six chapters which describe in authoritative detail the ways in which the different regions of the world are tackling the issue.

Ecological and Health Effects of Building Materials

Ecological and Health Effects of Building Materials
Author: Junaid Ahmad Malik
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2021-08-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3030760731

This book deals with the present adverse effects of using precarious building materials on the ecology and human health. Also, the detailed discussions on the novel and greener construction materials and their utilization as an alternative to the conventional harmful existing methods and materials are also presented in the subsequent chapters. This book helps to fill the research gaps in the existing prior-art knowledge in the field of sustainable construction and green building materials and methods giving due importance to ecology and health, specifically to the fields of sustainable structural engineering, sustainable geotechnical engineering, sustainable road engineering, etc. This book helps in achieving a sustainable environment through possible adoption of innovative and ecological construction practices. Hence, this book acts as a practical workbook, mainly for the academicians and practicing engineers who are willing to work toward the consecrated building industry. It is a well-established fact that the constructions of the engineering structures consume more and more earth resources than any other human activities in the world. In addition, the construction-related activities will produce several million tons of greenhouse gases, toxic emissions, water pollutants, and solid wastes. This creates a huge impact on environment and causes severe health issues on humans and animals. It is thus important to create an eco-friendly construction environment which can satisfy the ecological and health requirements.

U.S. Health in International Perspective

U.S. Health in International Perspective
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2013-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309264146

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, "peer" countries. In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings. U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.