Construction: Building for the future

The construction industry has a heavy carbon footprint, accounting for some 40% of global emissions, and yet, as the world’s population grows, demand for housing and building is only soaring. We kick off 2021 by looking at how the construction sector can become greener and some of the radical solutions required. We speak to sustainable architecture expert Dr Catherine De Wolf about the need to design recyclable buildings and how that will require a fundamental restructure of the way the construction industry works. We look at nearly zero energy wooden homes and investigate whether this material can help us kick our concrete habit – concrete being the most used substance on Earth. We home in on techniques to make cement greener and piezoelectric to light up spaces with the addition of vegetable waste, and at how self-healing building materials can prolong the life of civil infrastructures. And we explore the promise of fungal architecture to see whether structures grown from fungus can green the way we build.

Wooden structures such as the ZEB Lab building in Trondheim, Norway, could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of construction but they remain the exception in most countries. Image credit - Nicola Lolli/NERO

Environment, Industry

They can capture more carbon than they emit. So why aren’t wooden buildings mainstream?

Four storeys high and made almost entirely of wood, the ZEB Lab building in Trondheim, Norway, had, even before it existed, sucked as much carbon from the atmosphere as it would probably produce in construction. Now, thanks to its arboreal origins, as well as to the sleek expanse of solar panels on its roof and to other energy efficiency measures, it is a carbon-negative building. In other words, from birth to demise, it will have drawn down more carbon than it emitted.

Bacteria that can help buildings heal themselves have been tested on stone samples from Tintern Abbey in Wales and shown to improve the stone's microstructure without affecting colour or breathability. Image credit- Nilfanion/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>

Environment, Industry

Buildings, tunnels and bridges could soon repair themselves

Stone and concrete structures with the ability to heal themselves in a similar way to living organisms when damaged could help to make buildings safer and last longer.

Scientists are exploring the possibilities of turning mycelium, the fungus that produces mushrooms, into a new type of building material. Image credit - Rob Hille/Wikimedia, licensed under CC SA3.0

Environment

Why future homes could be made of living fungus

This article was originally published on 14 January 2021.

In the summer of 2014 a strange building began to take shape just outside MoMA PS1, a contemporary art centre in New York City. It looked like someone had started building an igloo and then got carried away, so that the ice-white bricks rose into huge towers. It was a captivating sight, but the truly impressive thing about this building was not so much its looks but the fact that it had been grown.

Concrete is responsible for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the second most used substance in the world. Image credit - Harry Dona/Unsplash

Environment, Industry

Carrot cement: How root vegetables and ash could make concrete more sustainable

Concrete has become our building material of choice for countless structures such as bridges, towers and dams. But it also has a huge environmental footprint mostly due to carbon dioxide emissions from the production of cement – one of its main constituents. Researchers are now experimenting with root vegetables and recycled plastic in concrete to see whether this can make it stronger – and more sustainable – and even power streetlights or air pollution sensors.

Only about 1% of demolished buildings are reused. To green the construction industry, buildings need to be made recyclable and the sector needs a fundamental shake-up, says Dr Catherine De Wolf. Image credit - Paul Barendreegt Fotografie

Interview, Energy, Environment, Industry

Q&A: ‘We need to reduce the ‘embodied energy’ of buildings

Retrofitting Europe’s buildings for energy efficiency is not enough to slash the carbon footprint of the construction sector and cut emissions in time to meet the Paris climate agreement goals, according to Dr Catherine De Wolf, assistant professor of design and construction management at TU Delft in the Netherlands.

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