Construction depends on materials - a lot of them - and the required quantities are increasing rapidly due to a global rise in both living standards and population growth. This entry provides a brief introduction to the material context and why it needs to change.
The current material industry depends on the pillaging of our home, the Earth. The low cost of raw materials - caused by the misvaluing of environmental externalities—has fuelled a consumeristic and linear material economy. [An externality is a cost or benefit of an economic activity experienced by a third party, i.e., the cost of pollution, or the cost of wildlife habitat destruction.]
Currently, the construction sector is...
responsible for 40% of energy and 20% of water used globally.
directly or indirectly contributing to approximately half of all global CO2 emissions.
Construction Materials specifically...
Account for 13% of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
Concrete production itself accounts for 5-7% of CO2 emissions.
Steel for construction represents another 5% of CO2 emissions.
2/5th of all gravel and sand, as well as a quarter of the virgin wood consumed in the world, are used by the construction sector.
From these facts, it is clear that the environmental footprint of the construction industry and specifically the material sector must be urgently addressed.
Currently, the construction and architecture industries have focused their attention on high-efficiency buildings as a means to address sustainability in the construction industry. There has been over 50 years of research into optimizing heating, lighting and cooling buildings and comparatively little into the materials that actually build them. The pretext for focusing on building operations rather than materiality is that operations account for 28% of global annual CO2 emissions, while building materials and construction (embodied carbon) account for 13%. While both numbers are incredibly high, the CO2 emissions released by building operations can be greatly reduced by switching to 100% renewable energy - a difficult but feasible solution. Meanwhile, reducing embodied carbon is a much tougher problem as this would require the establishment of completely new materials and construction methods that contain zero embodied carbon, or just stop building completely.
Focusing on building operations is a good way to get the ball rolling; however, it has become the main focus of the sustainable building industry and has distracted from further issues of materiality and embodied carbon, which, are now arguably more pressing given the difficulty of the problem.
The City of Vancouver is leading the shift from solely focusing on operational carbon (making high-performance buildings that consume less energy) to also focusing on embodied carbon (the environmental footprint of building materials). In the Fall of 2023, a new Vancouver Building By Law was adopted requiring all new buildings to calculate their embodied carbon and to reduce it in a staged approach.
To learn more about the current debates on how to change the material context, check out our next entry : De-Materializing or Re-Materializing.
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