Sustainable Construction, 5th Edition

Chapter 11Closing Materials Loops

The selection of low-impact materials and products for high-performance green building projects is perhaps the major challenge for project teams. Due to the increasing focus on the many looming disasters that will likely occur because of climate change, reducing carbon emissions is imperative. In line with this, reducing the embodied carbon, that is, the carbon emissions associated with the extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal of construction materials and products, has become a priority criterion for judging them as being “green.” The attributes that make materials and products acceptable for application in high-performance buildings include high recycled content, reused materials/products, locally and regionally available materials, certified wood products, and wood products made from rapidly renewable resources. However, coming to a common understanding of how to prioritize and combine these attributes into a decision system for product selection is still evolving. The good news is that significant progress is being made in crafting a widely accepted approach for determining the environmental efficacy of materials and products used in construction. The advent of green product certifications such as environmental product declarations (EPDs) and multi-attribute standards (MASs) promises to ease the past problems of determining the impacts of both products and whole buildings based on commonly accepted approaches. Green building assessment ...