Construction Industry: Political & Social Content

Construction Industry: Political & Social Content

Construction Industry: Political & Social Content

Introduction

The construction process and building use not only consume the most energy of all sectors in the UK and create the most CO2 emissions, they also create the most waste, use most non-energy related resources, and are responsible for the most pollution.

Climate Change

Building use in the UK contributes about 50% of the UK's CO2 emissions and construction contributes about another 7%. The AECB have shown that the Government figures on energy performance of houses grossly underestimate the CO2 gains that could be made by building energy efficient buildings. The main base performance criteria for energy efficient buildings all concern the thermal performance of the building shell where most of the CO2 gains can be most easily made.

The fact is that if we are serious about climate change then we need to stop playing games with technologies which do not deliver real CO2 savings. The real challenge in this area is the refurbishment of existing buildings. However it would help for a start, if we also produced really energy efficient new buildings.

Waste

According to DEFRA the waste going to landfill from the construction industry in 2004 was about 100 million tonnes. This is more than 3 times the amount of domestic waste collection (28 million tonnes). It has gone up from about 70 million tonnes in 2000. In many situations this is equivalent to one house being buried in the ground for every 3 built. This is an important consideration when the embodied energy of a building is being calculated. Usually such calculations do not take into account an extra 25% energy for waste. This is obviously more serious for higher embodied energy products than low embodied energy products.

There are increasing regulations about waste disposal from construction and many products, even common products like gypsum plasterboard and mineral wool insulation are now labelled as hazardous and require special disposal. In addition there are many projects to find new uses for waste construction materials (through Government bodies such as WRAP). However here, as with waste disposal, the less processed a material is, and the less hazardous, the easier re-use, recycling or healthy disposal (for example through composting) will be (Cleland 1995).

Resource Use

The construction industry is the major consumer of resources of all industries in the UK. It accounts for 90% of all non-fuel mineral use, and a large proportion of timber use. Many of the materials used in the UK now come from abroad, sometimes from countries where with less environmental control or labour justice.

As BioRegional and the World Wide Fund for Nature have shown in their One Planet Living material , if everyone in the world consumed resources at the same rate as we do in the UK it would take the equivalent of 3 planets now to sustain this consumption. As a global community we exceeded sustainable levels of consumption in the mid 1980s, so both from the point of view of ...