Sustainable Construction Materials Project Phase III Reports

Measuring the Impacts of Building Materials

Forintek Canada Corp., 2665 East Mall, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, V6T 1W5, 604/222-5743, 604/222-5690 (fax). CDN$250-320 for entire set (depending on affiliation).

Funded primarily by Natural Resources Canada, the Sustainable Construction Materials Project aims to provide a computer model that will derive useful environmental impact data from basic building design inputs. In the process of developing the computer model, Forintek has published a number of reports documenting the methodology and data collected. The first series of these reports was described in EBN

Vol. 3, No. 2. A second series of reports, published between June 1994 and January 1995, expands and refines both the data and the research methods of the first series.

The only materials for which life-cycle data has been collected to date are wood, steel, and concrete in structural applications. The Phase II reports presented much of this data. The Phase III reports expand and refine the assessment of environmental impacts associated with this data. Included with this new series are:

•

Phase III Summary Report (Forintek and Wayne B. Trusty and Associates, CDN$50);

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Raw Material Balances, Energy Profiles and Environmental Unit Factor Estimates for Mini-Mill Steel Materials (Steltech, CDN$175)—a supplement to the earlier steel report, which studied integrated mills only;

•

Assessing the Relative Ecological Carrying Capacity Impacts of Resource Extraction (Wayne B. Trusty and Associates and Dr. R. Paihlke, CDN$100)—a survey of experts intended to provide impact factors where quantitative data are unavailable;

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Demolition and Disposal Environmental Implications (U. of Western Ontario Centre for Studies in Construction, CDN$25)—a comparison of the three structural materials from a demolition perspective, concluding that they are all similar because none are likely to end up in a landfill;

•

Life-Cycle Energy Use in Office Buildings (Environmental Research Group, School of Architecture, U. of British Columbia, CDN$125)—a study comparing embodied energy and operating energy in model buildings using each of the three structural systems;

•

Equivalence Measures for Environmental Hazards and Toxins (Environmental Research Group, School of Architecture, U. of British Columbia, CDN$25)—a system for weighing pollution outputs with differing environmental impacts.

The

Phase III Summary Report includes an overview of progress to date and revisions to the overall plan for the project, a description of the life-cycle analysis methodology being used (including detailed research guidelines in an appendix), and executive summaries of the other reports in this series.

Based on the existing reports, the methods described, and the progress to date, the project as a whole may well be one of the most comprehensive and detailed tools for modeling the overall environmental impacts of buildings.

Perhaps the most interesting data to emerge from the project to date are from the

Life-Cycle Energy Use in Office Buildings report. This report makes a distinction between

initial embodied energy, or the energy invested in the initial construction of the building, and the

recurring embodied energy, referring to energy inputs to the products and services used for ongoing repairs, renovations, and maintenance. These two combined are still less than the operating energy requirements of a building constructed to present Canadian standards, but once energy use is reduced to 50% of current standards, the embodied energy inputs can exceed operating energy (depending on the life of the building). The report concludes with the suggestion that reducing operating energy use should be a primary goal, and that subsequent efforts to reduce embodied energy should go beyond simple material substitutions, focusing instead on design for longevity and the ability to replace individual elements in a building system without replacing the entire system.