Global Warming Potential of Construction Materials Used in Buildings

SUSTAINABILITY AND CONSTRUCTION (SUPPORTING PAPER)
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Global Warming and the Construction Industry: Sustainability and Construction (Supporting Paper)
Information for the poster was sourced from several published journal articles on sustainability and the construction industry, particularly the impact of built environments on the natural environment. In relation to global warming, the extraction of materials and the use of natural resources have an impact on ecology and sustainability. An article by Bhochhibhoya et al. (2017) focuses on the potential of building materials in causing global warming. In particular, the study analyzes the global warming potential of construction materials used in building three types of structures, semi-modern, modern, and traditional buildings in Sagarmatha National Park and Buffer Zone in Nepal. The authors have found that traditional buildings often require local materials such as stone and wood, but semi-modern and modern constructions use different commercial materials, including glass wool and cement. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, this study finds out that semi-modern and modern buildings emit four times and five times the quantity of GHGs of traditional buildings, respectively. Nevertheless, in the next two decades, traditional buildings will emit 20 percent more GHGs than modern buildings with thermal insulation in the walls of modern buildings (Bhochhibhova et al., 2017). The authors argue that thermal insulation in modern buddings significantly reduces energy consumption for heating spaces and thus decreases their potential to contribute to global warming.
On the evolution of the natural environment and built environment from early settlement to the modern-day, the poster relied on information from the “Architects’ Journal” that provides a graph on the “cement problem” that has been around since 1985. According to Reilly and Kinnane (2019), cement has been blamed for 8 percent of global CO2 emissions. Overall, experts have claimed that the construction sector is responsible for 38 percent of the total CO2 emissions (Neill, 2020). Unfortunately, the production of cement, a major material used in semi-modern and modern buildings, has grown from 1000 million tons in 1985 to more than 4500 million tons in 2015, as shown in Fig 1 below (Reilly & Kinnane, 2019). Since human history, starting from the Stone Age to the modern era, the built environment or manmade surroundings have continued to advance civilization. As civilizations continue to grow, the built environment has witnessed unprecedented evolution and development processes (Howard, 2021). The poster also relies on information from Wang et al.’s (2019) article that discusses the challenges and management issues that man has continued to face with the built environment, such as global warming. With the preference for cement over timber in semi-modern and modern buildings, the current capacity of concrete production is about 11,000 million m3/year, while that of timber is 3,800 million m3/year. Reilly and Kinnane (20...