Climate

The increased attention paid to resource efficiency, sustainable use of natural resources and sustainable buildings has raised awareness of the potential of the building sector to contribute to Europe’s goals in these areas.

The Resource Efficiency Roadmap identifies the building sector as one of the sectors that is key to addressing the challenges of energy, climate change and resource efficiency. The Roadmap recognises that increased waste recycling, among other measures, will contribute to a competitive construction sector.

Construction logistics offer useful solutions to improve both the productivity and sustainability of the industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate, in detail, the environmental impact of construction transport and whether the building certification scheme for a construction project has any influence on its transport arrangements. The analysis in this paper is based on a multiple case study of 40 Swedish projects.

Afghanistan has suffered from four decades of war, causing a massive migration of the rural population to the cities. Kabul was originally designed for 1,5 million people, whereas there are now 5 million in the city. The importation of modern western styles housing for rapid reconstruction reveals apparent cultural conflict and a significant environmental footprint.

Glass is a highly recyclable material, despite which, end-of-life building glass is almost never recycled into new glass products.

In the UK alone, almost 200,000 tonnes of glass is currently sent to landfill each year. In the EU, the proper recycling of all building glass waste could avoid 925,000 tonnes of landfilled waste every year and save around 1.23 million tonnes of primary raw materials annually.

The temperature of cities continues to increase because of the heat island phenomenon and the undeniable climatic change. The observed high ambient temperatures intensify the energy problem of cities, deteriorates comfort conditions, put in danger the vulnerable population and amplify the pollution problems.

Over the past four decades, global plastics production has quadrupled. If this trend were to continue, the GHG emissions from plastics would reach 15% of the global carbon budget by 2050. Strategies to mitigate the life-cycle GHG emissions of plastics, however, have not been evaluated on a global scale.

The transition to a carbon neutral EU requires deep energy demand reductions in key sectors of the economy such as buildings and transport, and that the remaining energy consumed is carbon neutral. Such transformations can only be achieved if the conditions are created for all actors and industrial sectors to maximise their multi-faceted contributions to this low-carbon revolution.

Thanks to funding from Innovate UK, in collaboration with the NICER programme, a new ‘toolkit’ has been developed as part of the ASBP-led ‘Delivering Innovative Steel ReUse ProjecT‘ (DISRUPT).

The Construction, Demolition & Deconstruction Policy Toolkit was developed by members of Recycle Colorado’s C&D Council, a group of industry stakeholders including public, private, and nonprofit sector entities working to support construction, demolition and deconstruction (C&D) materials recovery in Colorado.  The toolkit is currently in draft.

Evaluating demolition versus deconstruction practices - policy lessons from municipalitites around the US.

Faced with housing crises, aging building stock, landfill concerns, and climate impacts to the builtenvironment, municipalities and states are increasingly turning  their attention to deconstruction and building material reuse as an alternative to demolition.