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Construction is a major contributor to environmental degradation. It is responsible for 23% of air pollution, 50% of landfill wastes, and 50% of climate change. Keeping this in view, green buildings are key to achieving the world’s temperature target of staying below a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Thankfully, the construction industry is becoming aware of its atrocities on the environment and it has started making beneficial changes. Architectural and design firms are coming up with innovative ideas to incorporate sustainability in the future built environment.
In this post, we’ll have a look at such 6 green building innovations, but before that, let’s understand what green buildings are.
What is a Green Building?
A green building is a building designed, constructed, and operated such that it has minimal carbon emissions, low environmental impact, preserves natural resources, and has a positive impact on the climate and the natural environment.
The main features of a green building include:
- It uses water, energy, and other natural resources efficiently and sustainably.
- It uses renewable energy sources, such as solar panels.
- Green buildings have reuse and recycling programs.
- Sustainable buildings have pollution, indoor air quality, and waste reduction measures.
- During the construction, green buildings use non-toxic, ethical, and sustainable materials.
- Environmental sustainability and quality of life are the central principles during the design, construction, and operation of a green building.
- Green buildings adapt to the changing environment, climate, and seasons.
Innovations in Green Buildings and the Built Environment
Here are six green building innovations that have immense potential of reducing the environmental impact of construction, if implemented correctly. They are a mix of modern and ancient techniques, showing that we need to innovate, but we also need to look at what our ancestors did, because they were clearly onto something as the climate was way better back then!
1. Digital Realities in Construction
Digital realities are taking over the world and green buildings would be incomplete without their role in it. Here’s how augmented, virtual, and mixed reality are playing a role in improving our construction practices:
1.1. Augmented and Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) involves the usage of technology to create a simulated environment, which means they do or make something that looks real but is not real, such as a car video game in which you act like you are driving a real car to play the game.
Virtual reality has taken the world by storm, specifically in the media and the gaming industries. With time, it’s also gaining popularity in other domains, with immense potential for the construction industry.
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience in which the real-life environment is modified and enhanced through the addition of sound, visual elements, and other sensory stimuli via technology.
Data suggests that by 2025, mobile AR users will reach 1.7 billion, which shows that this technology is gaining momentum and the construction industry has immense potential to utilize it to reduce waste and resource usage in all sorts of projects.
AR and VR together, or just each on their own, can provide massive support in turning our construction practices sustainable. Here’s how:
VR and AR reduce the time spent on revisions because simulations help in viewing design errors, and construction clashes, such as overlapping of building components, before the start of the physical construction.
An excellent example in this regard is when the design team at the Leeds Arena project in Great Britain used AR and VR to save over £350,000 by detecting construction clashes. Imagine how many construction resources and waste they would have saved!
Design model integration with the VR and AR software enables content visibility. The models become usable at all stages of design and construction with minor tweaks. Other practices require constant modifications to set up an efficient cooperation flow between designers and the construction crew, which wastes time and resources.
VR and AR make construction workers’ training safe. Construction sites require appropriate health and safety measures to avoid accidents, which become useless if the workers don’t have appropriate training to utilize them. VR and AR allow companies to train their workers in recognizing and avoiding hazards with real-time muscle and visual memory without posing any physical risk or danger.
BIM, LCA, AR, and VR together reduce cost and carbon footprint. A study with 66 participants was conducted, and it was found that all the projects’ costs and carbon footprint had the potential to be reduced via the help of BIM, LCA, and VR, without compromising on aesthetics. Throw VR into the mix and the savings will surely multiply!
1.2. Mixed Reality
Mixed reality blurs lines between imagination and reality by utilizing technology to blend real-life objects with digital content. It also allows interaction between them, which could then be used to modify virtual designs to fit into the real world in real-time.
In construction, designers can create a virtual copy of what they are planning to build, which can then be seen and manipulated in the real world on the building site.
Three significant benefits of mixed reality in supporting sustainable construction are:
- It allows quick identification of variations or scanning errors in the point cloud data, which then restricts future design flows that could lead to resource wastage.
- Mixed reality makes communications with stakeholders and amongst teams in a virtual environment possible, which allows everyone to see and interact with the 3D hologram at once without going anywhere, leading to a significant reduction in travel carbon footprint.
- It reduces delays caused by change orders through real-time collaboration between architects, designers, and detailers.
2. Workplace Space and Energy Optimisation
Space management is one of the biggest concerns for organizations around the world, as it is essential for optimizing the work environment, employees’ productivity, and efficiency. It is also important for improving the environmental performance of a workplace.
Companies throughout the world are opting for office management software, which provides actionable data on a real-time basis. Even though space management isn’t necessarily one of the major design aspects in creating a sustainable built environment, it does wonders in sustainable building operation, garnering it a spot in green building innovations.
Real-time space insights assist in occupancy management, move management (how employees move on-site), meetings and reservations, and maintenance management.
Unfortunately, organizations only utilize 11% of the total office space.
Efficient occupancy management reduces space wastage. Extra space in an office uses extra energy, which impacts both the environment and the company’s finances.
Reducing space doesn’t necessarily mean overcrowding the workplace. It’s about space optimization as overcrowding could deteriorate indoor air quality and promote virus spreads (since COVID, employees are wary of crowded workplaces anyway!).
Move management assists in identifying how employees are moving around on the site. It also monitors relocations and refurbishments. By knowing all this, you can adjust your employees’ workstations such that their productivity is maximized and they don’t have to move around in a way that might impact their efficiency.
Maintenance management keeps an eye on the overall performance of the workplace ensuring that the HVAC and other similar systems are performing efficiently.
Sense_ is a building management software developed by the British architectural design studio spacelab_. One of their prominent features in terms of sustainability is reducing a building’s energy consumption by up to 40%. They utilise machine learning to achieve maximum energy savings possible.
3. Whole-life Carbon Emissions Estimations of a Planned Building
Architects and designers are striving to design carbon neutral and carbon negative green and sustainable buildings. This movement is going through various countries of the world to achieve the target of keeping the temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
London is taking the lead in this regard as its Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has developed a green policy, according to which, all the Mayor referred development projects are required to calculate and reduce Whole Life-Cycle Carbon (WLC). The policy encourages other projects to adopt the same approach so that the net-zero 2050 goal can be successfully achieved.
Architects and designers around the world are implementing numerous green building innovations and technologies to estimate and reduce the carbon emissions of a building, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Green Building Certification Systems. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) from the USA, and Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) from the UK are leaders in green building certifications.
LCA is a methodology for calculating the complete environmental impact of a product, process, or service. One of the top tools to perform this analysis is SimaPro.
In terms of innovations, architecture and design studio Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS) has come up with a free tool, FCBS Carbon, which is capable of estimating the whole-life carbon emissions of a planned building.
Whole-life carbon means all the CO2 emitted throughout the lifecycle of the building. The tool allows architects to generate a spreadsheet of the anticipated environmental impact, which they can later use to tweak the design or materials to reduce the building’s carbon footprint.
4. Climate Responsive Buildings
A climate-responsive building design is an architecture that accommodates the weather requirements of a structure by using data of weather patterns and factors such as humidity, the intensity of the sun, wind, and rainfall.
Such design’s ingenuity in cutting down the electricity and insulation carbon footprint throughout the operation of a structure is commendable.
Even though we are placing it in green building innovations, we believe it’s more of an ancient practice as our ancestors have been doing this for centuries to cope with the weather conditions as they didn’t have HVAC systems and electricity like we have today.
An excellent example of a climate-responsive green building is the Kuggen building in Lindholmsplatsen, Gothenburg, Sweden. It is the new Chalmers University (Sweden) building designed by the Wingårdh Architects Studio.
It has a climate-responsive building shell (CABS), which is a group of facades and roofs that repeatedly change their features in response to the changing performance requirements.
The main purpose is to save energy by optimizing heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting. In addition to this, CABS ensures that the indoor environmental quality of the building is excellent.
5. Sustainable Construction with Ancient Techniques
If we look back at history, we find that our ancestors did sustainable construction way better than we do, and there’s a ton of inspiration in their architecture to tackle the carbon issue that we’ve on our hands right now. In this section, we’ll shed light on the three such techniques that are taking green design to the next level:
5.1. Rammed Earth
Traditional rammed earth is a natural and sustainable material made by combining clay-rich soil, water, and a natural stabilizer.
The main types of natural stabilizers used in this technique include animal urine, animal waste, plant fibers, and bitumen. Most of these items are locally available, specifically, in agricultural areas.
Rammed earth structures are made by placing the mixture inside temporary frameworks, similar to concrete pouring, which are removed once the material has hardened. In addition to being sustainable, rammed earth structures are sufficiently strong as well with a compressive strength of 2.5 megapascals, which is approximately 10% of that of conventional brick.
The Great Wall of China and the Alhambra in Spain are made using rammed earth. Given that both of these structures are over 1000 years old, this material has substantial potential of becoming a mainstream sustainable material, at least as a replacement for bricks in non-load bearing walls.
5.2. Locally Sourced Materials
Material transport accounts for 16% of the total GHG emissions from a construction project.
Keeping this in view, one of the best ways to reduce the carbon footprint of a construction project is to use locally sourced materials, one of the ancient practices, as during those days transportation was quite difficult.
One such project underway is the construction of the South African Thabo Mbeki Presidential Library by the British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye’s studio, Adjaye Associates, in Johannesburg.
The Thabo Mbeki is an eight-domed structure inspired by the traditional African granaries. It will have geometric apertures at roof level to allow natural light to enter the building, reducing electricity requirements. The main construction materials of this 5,400 square meter structure will be locally sourced mud, timber cladding from native wood species, and local stone-made terrazzo flooring.
5.3. Bamboo
Bamboo was a staple construction material in ancient India and China for the lower classes’ houses. It was also used to build cable bridges, which stand strong, even today.
The main reason behind the strength of bamboo is its slenderness ratio, which is almost equal to that of steel. In addition to this, it is quite rigid with the potential of reaching a tensile strength of up to 94.60 MPa. Furthermore, it is waterproof and renewable. What else do you need in a sustainable material?!
In recent times, architects are incorporating this sustainable material more and more in their designs. One such example is the Green School in Bali, an exemplary high-performance educational institution with sustainable features.
6. Hempcrete Buildings
One of the most intelligent green building innovations is hempcrete, which is a natural material, and thus, is an excellent sustainable building material for construction.
Now, most of you would be wondering, what is hempcrete?
Hempcrete is a natural and sustainable lightweight concrete alternative made from mixing air lime and hemp. Hemp is a plant that doesn’t require plant protection materials for growth and survives with little water. In addition to this. It does wonders for agricultural soil regeneration.
Hempcrete has excellent thermal properties and is significantly lighter than concrete. In addition to this, existing hempcrete structures have shown their moisture absorption capability, which makes them an excellent green building material for structures in humid climates. Did we mention its capability of reducing the likelihood of interior mold?!
A French architecture firm Barrault Pressacco has created a new building in Paris using Hempcrete as concrete for the walls. It was sprayed in layers within the frames and then topped with lime rendering to set it. The building contains 15 social housing apartments with two central courtyards.
Even though hempcrete can’t entirely replace concrete because of its lightness, it has immense potential in non-load-bearing walls. In addition to being quite easy to grow, hemp absorbs carbon after being used in construction making it an excellent green material for green buildings throughout their lifecycle.
These are the top 6 green building innovations that have an immense potential to make our built environment sustainable in the coming years. With the climate crisis looming, we have no choice but to accommodate sustainability not just in our daily lives but in the broader sectors as well. Let us know in the comments below which one you believe will be a game-changer among these. Also, don’t forget to share other innovations that you might have in your mind.
