The Effects Of Climate Change On The Environment

This paper contains a STEEP (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economical and Political) analysis of the implications on sustainability in construction. The STEEP analysis will be based on 5 different peer-reviewed journals that I have read on each area of STEEP. These journals will be cross examined and compared to one another to see if there is any correlation between them. Firstly I will talk about each journal and summarize what it is about; I will then try and relate the journals to each other in some way. If one journal cannot be related to any of the others, I will state this in my conclusion and provide a reason why there is no connection or relationship between that specific journal and the others.

With the increasing popularity of sustainable construction, the need of life cycle cost analysis will become imperative in the future. Sustainable construction is a way of responsibly creating and managing a healthy

(ASBEC) suggests that the building sector is directly responsible for around 24% of the total energy use. At present this is split fairly evenly between the residential and commercial building sectors. Reducing energy use

Various new legislations from UK Government and EU standards have been raised for lower energy consumption and lower greenhouse gas emissions to meet stated demands. Up until now the construction industry has been introducing new products in order to meet the lower energy targets. Also the technological developments has given the opportunity to the manufacturers to produce highly efficient heat emitters. These will help reduce overall energy consumption and also will help to achieve a reduced carbon emission. In the UK, Domestic heating contributes to around 20% of total carbon emissions. (J Douglas 2015,p4)

Use phase of the building is the largest stage that impacts environment during the life cycle, so require more attention in the field of energy saving of building. In the initial design stage of buildings, through LCA can help design decisions, such as the appropriate use of zero energy building techniques. To quantitatively assess the energy consumption and environmental impact among all above stages, LCA is undoubtedly the best choice that can full evaluate the impacts during extraction of raw materials, material creation, sale, maintenance, disposal or recycling, also global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other index. Thereby more effectively improving environmental performance is to achieve green building. LCA will provide

Buildings currently stand for almost 40% of entire energy consumption in the world therefore there is a great energy saving potential in buildings (Europe’s buildings under the microscope e a country-by-country review of the energy performance of buildings. Buildings Performance Institute Europe, 2011).

Voluntarily or involuntarily, the construction industry has a huge impact on the environment. It is estimated that the construction industry in the United States consumes about 39% of the total energy and 72% of the electricity produced within the country (Kansal and Kadambari 2010). Also as projected by Ashuri et al. (2011) the CO2 emissions from buildings will grow faster over the next 25 years, if the construction business continues as usual. Apart from the construction activities which consume a lot of energy, most of the energy consumption also occurs during the operational phase of these buildings (Menassa 2011). Hence, building operational energy consumption plays a very important role in the long run. Also it has a tremendous effect on the overall costs of the building (Gasic et al. 2012). In a world of sustainability, energy efficiency is considered as one of the least costly and most effective tools to reduce carbon emissions and global warming (Jafari and Valentin 2016). Retrofitting the old buildings is one of the cheapest solutions to move towards energy efficiency, which reduces the existing problem of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (Calì et al. 2011).

Use phase of building is the largest stage that impacts environment during the life cycle, so require more attention in the field of energy saving of building. In the initial design stage of buildings, through LCA can help design decisions, such as the appropriate use of zero energy building techniques. To quantitatively assess the energy consumption and environmental impact among all above stages, LCA is undoubtedly the best choice that can full evaluate the impacts during extraction of raw materials, material creation, sale, maintenance, disposal or recycling, also global warming, air pollution, water pollution and other index. Thereby more effectively improving environmental performance is to achieve green building. LCA will provide the support of data on saving water, energy, material and other indicators. Based on LCA gradually promote the use of the Environment Product Declaration (EPD), this declaration will serve as a business and marketing communication product sustainability information, greatly enhance the green building(products) influence in the consumers. In today with increasing serious energy and environmental issues, using green building instead of traditional high-energy building has become a trend. Life cycle thinking and ways can facilitate the development of the green building process, and help us to make more environmentally friendly choices for building design and material selection, especially as consumers we need to follow.

The sustainability of construction materials is a huge topic in today’s world of engineering. Finding a way to improve the efficiency, costs, and environmental impact of construction is a key discussion topic. When it comes to structural steel being used today, our society is pushing towards the use of “green” steel. This term is used to represent the life cycle of steel as well as the production of structural steel. While most construction materials differ significantly from one another, structural steel is manufactured from recycled materials, but only at a limited number of locations. Another important aspect of green steel is the cradle-to-cradle process that it goes through. The cradle-to-cradle

Estimation of emissions at construction phase is one of the most complicated tasks when performing an emission study on a building (Guggemos and Horvath, 2005, Junnila et al., 2006a). This is due to the uniqueness of construction activities and associated methods from project to project. Unavailability of quality data and inventories and time consuming nature of data collection are some of the other reasons that emissions at construction phase is given less consideration.

The purpose of this project is to find a solution from the industry problems of a large consumption of energy and resources, which has a significant role to play in environmental sustainability. The area of solution that this team will research and analyse is the construction waste management strategies. Within the construction waste management strategies the team will research the reusing of material, the recycling of material and the disposing of material. The design criteria created will assist in selecting the most effective alternative solution to be the final proposed solution. The benefits for adopting the final proposed solution is that a criteria has been made to select the most efficient solution from three

S1: Following the European directive on the energy performance of buildings (EPBD), all the member states of the European Union (EU) should enact national plans and objectives to improve the use of the buildings, which consume very low and close to zero energy.

However, the warehouse CO2 emission is calculated as electricity consumption per square metre by a web-based tool, CargoScope. The variables considered are volume and storage duration. Similarly, Harris et al. (2011) analyses the CO2 emissions from transportation and depots, logistics costs and CO2 emission. using a traditional cost optimization approach. They calculate the CO2 emissions of the depot associating with the electricity consumption per depot per square metre. The depot data only considers the size of the buildings without any requirements of cooling or heating. They use the figure (2 kWh/m2) from the British Land Company PLC (2005) and conversion factor (0.54 kg CO2/kWh) from DEFRA (2005), generating CO2 emissions of 1.08 kg/m2 for UK depot. It is also a simple conversion. Rizet et al. (2010) investigates energy consumption and CO2 emissions of food supply chains in three European countries. Warehouse emissions are calculated based on CO2 emission per volume of product in kg. Different from the previous paper, besides the electricity, this paper considers the fuel used by handling equipment and heating, the gas energy for heating. Dadhich et al. (2015) use hybrid life cycle assessment (LCA) technique to analyse the GHG emission in the plasterboard supply chain and assess some possible strategies to reduce GHG emission. They suggest cross-docking principle could help reduce the warehouse emission. In

Concrete is the most commonly used material on earth apart from water. The main reasons for such a wide use are the performance benefits that include durability, robustness, thermal mass, acoustic performance and flood resilience. The amount of concrete used annually is equal to about 2.8 billion tons in 2008. Thus, the concrete industry is one of the main contributors to the total CO2 emission of the world. Cement, the principal component for production of concrete, manufacturing amounts to approximately 7% of the total CO2 emission in 2007 globally. However, carbonation reaction that occurs in concrete with age reabsorbs CO2 released during calcination. Therefore, the main focus of reduction in emission during cement production is by reducing the energy use or the amount of cement used in the manufacturing. Moreover, the advantage of concrete is that it is locally produced; as well as all its primary components are universally available. Apart from that, concrete can last longer than other construction material and has low maintenance and long service life. Thus, conserves a lot of energy resulting in a very less CO2 emission if measured according to Full Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The main problem with manufacturing of concrete apart from cement usage is the large quantities of gravel, sand and water are used that has considerable ecological effects. The use of concrete will increase in coming years as large number of developing countries began to

Many efforts were conducted to link calculation of embodied carbon dioxide with optimization and decision-making processes. Park et al. (2012) presented a methodology that is capable of minimizing CO2 emissions and cost associated with material production stage. They applied their model to a 35 story high rise building and they took into account composite sections. They studied different types of steel reinforced columns taking into consideration the cost and carbon dioxide emissions produced from these columns. They considered strength levels of concrete and steel. Nevertheless, Park et al. (2012) did not consider construction phase,