Construction projects using emerging bio-based materials have been realized over the past ten to fifteen years within Europe. Bio-based buildings utilize properties of natural materials to regulate internal environments, particularly fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity. Despite individual exemplar projects demonstrating functional performance and long-term operational cost savings, there hasn’t been a proliferation of commercial or domestic bio-based projects.

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the carbon impacts of the construction and refurbishing of buildings, with the majority of focus on their operational performance. Yet our buildings are constructed using materials, components, and products. These materials have to be extracted from the ground or grown, transported to a facility for processing, transported again to be transformed into a product, and finally transported to a construction site.

Carbon neutrality to limit global warming is an increasing challenge for all industries, particularly for the cement industry, due to the chemical emission of the process. For decades, reducing the clinker factor has been one of the main strategies to reduce the carbon footprint. Additional cuttings in the clinker content of cements seem possible with the upsurge of novel supplementary cementitious materials.

The use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) to replace part of the clinker in cement is the most successful strategy to reduce CO2 emissions in the global cement industry. However, limited supplies of conventional SCMs make it difficult to take this strategy further unless new types of SCMs become available.

The only type of material available in the quantities needed to meet demand is clay containing kaolinite, which can be calcined to produce an effective SCM. Such clays are widely available in countries where most growth in demand for cement is forecast.

There are several facets of aluminum when it comes to sustainability. While it helps to save fuel due to its low density, producing it from ores is very energy-intensive. Recycling it shifts the balance towards higher sustainability, because the energy needed to melt aluminum from scrap is only about 5% of that consumed in ore reduction. The amount of aluminum available for recycling is estimated to double by 2050.

A dynamic material flow model was developed to simulate the evolution of global aluminum stocks in geological reserve and anthropogenic reservoir from 1900 to 2010 on a country level. The contemporary global aluminum stock in use (0.6 Gt or 90 kg/capita) has reached about 10% of that in known bauxite reserves and represents an embodied energy amount that is equivalent to three-quarters of the present global annual electricity consumption.

Aluminium - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

Glass is a material inextricably linked with human civilization. It is also the product of an energy intensive industry. About 75% to 85% of the total energy requirements to produce glass occur when the raw materials are heated in a furnace to more than 1500 °C. During this process, large volumes of emissions arise. The container and flat glass industries, which combined account for 80% of total glass production, emit over 60 million tonne of CO2 per year.

The glass industry is part of the energy-intensive industry posing a major challenge to fulfill the CO₂ reduction targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. The segments of the glass industry, e.g., container or flat glass, are quite diverse and attribute to different glass products with different requirements to product quality and various process options.

EDGE (“Excellence in Design for Greater Efficiencies”) is a free software, a green building standard, and an international green building certification system, enabling users to design and certify resource-efficient and zero carbon buildings.