Sustainability is defined the desire to perform activities without any depletion of resources or bringing any harmful effect on the environment. Practicing sustainable construction methods will help avoiding harmful effects from construction activities.
which can impact environment in one or more ways. Civil engineering field being the major part of the economy, it is very key that sustainable construction practice dominate the past followed conventional construction practice and methods. construction involves activities like use of construction materials from various sources, use of machineries, demolition of existing frameworks, use of green fields, cutting down of tress etc.
construction has a direct impact on the environment due to following reasons:
Sustainability assessment of construction projects is essential to the fact that it does not create any harmful effects on the living ecosystem while optimizing the cost of construction. This is to make sure the availability of resources for the future generations.
In order to support sustainability in the field of construction, the building and the built environment have to satisfy some of the important criteria. This will include:
Sustainable building must stop threatening use of environment or species wherever possible so that the natural habitat is not affected.
Support and help must reach to the real need, aspirations and real requirements. Also involve the needed in the key decisions.
Wastage of resources, substances, water, poor design is not recommended. The construction constructed have to be affordable and manageable. Overconsumption of disappropriate amount of resources like land, money, use or disposal, construction must be stopped.
Sand and Gravel are being used for thousands of years in construction. The demand for these is increasing day by day as demand for infrastructure development is increasing.
Over use of construction substances such river sand and gravels also have negative impact on environment. Excessive sand-and-gravel mining causes the degradation of rivers. Sand mining results in the lowering of the stream bottom, that results in bank erosion. This results in the destruction of aquatic and riparian habitat through large changes in the channel morphology. The harmful effects include bed degradation, lowered water tables and channel instability.
There are many harmful impacts of using river sand and mining of gravels and a detailed study is needed to list all the negative impacts. The use of alternate building materials can reduce the impact of this on environment.
The alternate to river sand is Manufactured Sand (M-Sand) which can be used in building works reduce impacts of mining river sand.
Read article on: Manufactured Sand (M-Sand)
Less dependency on pollution causing products and substances, transports, power and energy are encouraged.
Improper disposal of these waste tend to be hazardous to the environment. Annually billions of tons of demolition waste are generated worldwide for the need for new construction activities. Below mentioned are some of the approaches to make the construction waste sustainable:
Use of durable building materials and quality control at site for durability of structure is one step towards minimization of building waste generation.
Instead of endangering the health of laborer, builders and occupants’ building must improve leisure, living and the working environments.
Around 40% of total energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are directly due to construction and operation of buildings. The best of to reduce this impact is the use of green buildings construction approaches.
The use of transparent concrete in buildings also helps to reduce the use of energy for lighting during day time.
Read Article: Transparent concrete
Fig.2.Sustainable construction
Too many aspirations for a undertaking will won’t give sustainable construction. Hence, identification of appropriate targets, benchmarks and tools along with their proper management will give sustainability in construction.