Environmental Impact Assessment Of Buildings

This Special Issue covers a wide range of areas—including building orientation, service life, use of photocatalytically active structures and PV facades, implications of transportation system, building types (i.e., high rise, multilevel, commercial, residential), life cycle assessment, and structural engineering—that need to be considered in the environmental impact assessment of buildings, and the chapters include case studies across the globe. Consideration of these strategies would help reduce energy and material consumption, environmental emissions, and waste generation associated with all phases of a building’s life cycle. Chapter 1 demonstrates that green star concrete exhibits the same structural properties as conventional concrete in Australia. Chapter 2 showed that the use of TiO2 as a photocatalyst on the surface of construction materials with a suitable stable binding agent, such as aggregates, would enable building walls to absorb NOx from air. This study found that TiO2 has the potential to reduce ambient concentrations of NOx from areas where this pollutant becomes concentrated under solar irradiation. Chapter 3 presents the life cycle assessment of architecturally integrated glass–glass photovoltaics in building facades to find the appropriate material composition for a multicolored PV façade offering improved environmental performance. Chapter 4 shows that urban office buildings lacking appropriate orientation experienced indoor overheating. Chapter 5 details four modeling approaches that were implemented to estimate buildings’ response towards load shedding. Chapter 6 covers the life cycle GHG emissions of high-rise residential housing block to discover opportunities for environmental improvement. Chapter 7 discusses an LCA framework that took into account variation in the service life of buildings associated with the use of different types of materials. Chapter 8 presents a useful data mining algorithm to conduct life cycle asset management in residential developments built on transport systems.

Life cycle assessment enables the identification of a broad range of potential environmental impacts occurring across the entire life of a product, from its design through to its eventual disposal or reuse. The need for life cycle assessment to inform environmental design within the built environment is critical, due to the complex range of materials and processes required to construct and manage our buildings and infrastructure systems. After outlining the framework for life cycle assessment, this book uses a range of case studies to demonstrate the innovative input-output-based hybrid approach for compiling a life cycle inventory. This approach enables a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of resource requirements and environmental outputs so that the potential environmental impacts of a building or infrastructure system can be ascertained. These case studies cover a range of elements that are part of the built environment, including a residential building, a commercial office building and a wind turbine, as well as individual building components such as a residential-scale photovoltaic system. Comprehensively introducing and demonstrating the uses and benefits of life cycle assessment for built environment projects, this book will show you how to assess the environmental performance of your clients’ projects, to compare design options across their entire life and to identify opportunities for improving environmental performance.

Written by experts, this text deals with how environmental impact assessment should be carried out for specific environmental components such as air and water.

Looking at the importance of environmental impact assessements, this title includes all the latest theoretical and practical procedures of EIA, as well as including the latest changes to UK legislation.

This book provides a single-source reference for whole life embodied impacts of buildings. The comprehensive and persuasive text, written by over 50 invited experts from across the world, offers an indispensable resource both to newcomers and to established practitioners in the field. Ultimately it provides a persuasive argument as to why embodied impacts are an essential aspect of sustainable built environments. The book is divided into four sections: measurement, including a strong emphasis on uncertainty analysis, as well as offering practical case studies of individual buildings and a comparison of materials; management, focusing in particular on the perspective of designers and contractors; mitigation, which identifies some specific design strategies as well as challenges; and finally global approaches, six chapters which describe in authoritative detail the ways in which the different regions of the world are tackling the issue.

Environment Impact Assessment: Precept & Practice deals with theoretical, practical, managerial and legal issues in multidisciplinary holism to suit Indian environmental planning and governance. Environment Impact Assessment is not only considered a tool for sustainable development but a promissory augury of creation of equitable regime of for ecosystem governance. The book is laced with polemical issues in dexterous detail to cater erudite demand of environmental planners besides fulfilling the void of curriculum and pedagogic requirements of technical universities, environmental management and legal studies. The book offers diversity of thoughts across discipline on Environment Impact Assessment discourse in rounded perspective having immense potential for textual and reference utilities. The treatment of subject is not only discursive but paradigmatic to eradicate contemporary crisis in Environment Impact Assessment regime. It combines theoretical postulate with deeper empiricism and penetrative case studies to make an intriguing subject of Environment Impact Assessment with greater ease and lucidity. Note: T&F does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Sustainability in the built environment is a major issue facing policy-makers, planners, developers and designers in the UK, Europe and worldwide. The measuring of buildings and cities for sustainability becomes increasingly important as pressure for green, sustainable development translates into policy and legislation. The problems of such measurement and evaluation are presented by the authors in contributions which move from the general to the particular, e.g. from a general framework for an environmentally sustainable form of urban development to a specific input-output model application to environmental problems. The book is divided into three parts: the first covers city models and sustainable systems - research programmes, environmental policies, green corporations and collaborative strategies to make urban development more sustainable; part two discusses the problems of evaluating the built environment in planning and construction, covering economic and environmental methods and construction, development and regeneration processes; part three illustrates a number of applications using different approaches and techniques and referring to a range of environmental aspects of the natural and built environment, from maintaining historic buildings to transport management and air pollution monitoring.

Demands on the construction industry are changing, and it is now virtually essential for environmental management to be considered at all stages of a project. Many construction managers are finding a quantitative approach useful, and this book outlines four quantitative methods which can be applied at different construction stages, and which fit within a comprehensive framework of dynamic Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). These include: a method to quantitatively evaluate and reduce pollution and hazards levels a method to evaluate the environmental-consciousness of proposed construction plans a method to reduce on-site construction wastes through an incentive reward programme a method to promote C and D waste exchange in the local construction industry. With an experimental case study of the application of these methods, this book delivers a comprehensive review of environmental management issues in construction. With regulatory requirements potentially favouring the quantitative approach, this timely guide ensures that contractors will be able to keep pace with environmental management standards.