From path to process – transitioning from green to sustainable materials use

Abstract

Building and construction activities consume more raw materials by weight than any other industry sector – about 50% of all the materials extracted from the Earth’s crust annually are transformed into building and construction materials and components (Koroneos and Dompros, 2005). Extraction, manufacturing and transportation effects represent a contribution that each building material or component makes to the overall environmental burden of a building. Once a building is occupied, it is the constituent materials which determine contributions to the outdoor environmental effects listed in Table 1B and to indoor environmental quality. At the end of service life (EOSL) a building material may be disposed of at a landfill, leading to wastage of materials and embodied energy and contribution to toxic loading in the environment. A fundamental objective of sustainable construction is to use resource efficiency strategies and ecological principles to sharply reduce and even reverse these environmentally harmful effects of building materials use.