The most popular eco friendly materials in home building

Taking care of the environment has become largely popular in the past years. With growing pollution in our world being ‘green’ and ‘eco friendly’ has become a must. Every way of taking care of our environment is dearly needed and many new ideas of protecting it have been created.

The Basics

Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, “house”; -λογία, “study of”) is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment.[1]

Starting from the World War II and weapon production polluting has rapidly started increasing. There are various sorts of pollutants with the most famous being: carbon monoxide, heavy metals, herbicides, pesticides, industrial waste and unfortunately many others.

The Most Popular Eco Friendly Materials

The ecology has developed into a serious science constantly trying to find new ways of protecting our environment and one of the new trends in ecology is using eco friendly materials for building houses. According to the article ‘Towards computational eco-analysis of building designs’ construction and operation of buildings is internationally a major cause of resource depletion and environmental pollution, traditional criteria of construction cost and energy use estimation are insufficient in view of a comprehensive environmental impact analysis of buildings.[2]

What is considered to be a good idea is to recycle residues into building materials. In the study ‘Research & development methodology for recycling residues as building materials — a proposal’ [3] it is said that environmental evaluation of the new technology is very important because not all recycling is environmentally sound. According to the book ‘Green Building Materials’ [4] green building has achieved a critical mass and is becoming just ‘building’. Green building materials are becoming more important than ever. It refers to Wikipedia [5] which says that building materials that typically considered to be ‘green’ include lumber from forests that have been certified to a third-party forest standard, rapidly renewable plant materials like bamboo and straw, insulating, recycled stone, recycled metal, and other products that are non-toxic, reusable, renewable, and/or recyclable. Eco friendly building materials are helping people living lives of better quality without emission of harmful materials which are discussed into details in the article ‘Emissions of organophosphate and brominated flame retardants from selected consumer products and building materials’[6].

The periodic gradual warming of the earth’s atmosphere is a natural process, however, its impact is accelerated by human activity boosting the input of particular gases into the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide. Trees and carbon dioxide are linked since during their times of active growth, as part of photosynthesis, trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and ‘sequester’ (store or fix) it in woody tissue – thus reducing the greenhouse effect.

Carbon released and stored in the manufacture of building materials:

Conclusion

With the amount of pollution constantly rising each and every day, the only comforting notion is that everybody is set on living ‘green’. Amongst many things that includes eco friendly building materials which is hopefully leading to more innovations when it comes to preserving our environment as clean as possible.

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecology
[2] ‘Towards computational eco-analysis of building designs’, Computers & Structures
Volume 67, Issue 5, 1 June 1998, Pages 375-387
[3] ‘Research & development methodology for recycling residues as building materials — a proposal’ Waste Management Volume 21, Issue 3, June 2001, Pages 213-219
[4] ‘Green Building Materials’ by: Ross Spiegel and Dru Meadows
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_building
[6] ‘Emissions of organophosphate and brominated flame retardants from selected consumer products and building materials’ by Sabine Kemmlein, Oliver Hahn and Oliver Jann

AUTHOR: Josip Ivanovic

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