Construction Materials and Embodied Impact: An Introduction

About this course.

Materials drive environmental impact because everything we build has to be dug out of the ground, processed, moved and installed, and each of those steps consumes energy and resources and produces emissions and waste. A building is, in one sense, a large and long-lasting assembly of materials, so the decisions made about what those materials are — and how much of them is used — shape the environmental footprint of the project before anyone turns on a light. For builders, designers, estimators and specifiers, this means that material choice is not only a question of cost, strength and appearance; it is also one of the most significant environmental decisions on a project.

The scale is what makes it matter. Buildings and construction are among the largest users of raw materials in Australia and one of the largest producers of waste, and construction and demolition waste is one of the country's biggest waste streams. Behind every tonne of material on site sits a chain of activity: extraction of raw materials such as ore, sand, gravel, limestone or timber; processing and manufacture, which for some materials involves very high-temperature, energy-intensive industrial processes; transport, sometimes over long distances; and finally installation, with its own offcuts and packaging. Each link in that chain has an environmental cost, and much of it is incurred a long way from the building site, in quarries, mills, smelters and factories.