Architects design, select materials and often are unaware about the processes involved to extract, process, and transport said materials. Designers are especially unaware of what is done with demolition of construction waste.
Directly or not, architects have the power of making this world better and cleaner through their decisions.
Let’s talk about waste!
How the lifetime of a material can be considered within a project.
Reuse – Materials can be selected based on their origin. Are they made of recycled material? In the future is it possible to recycle this material? Is it possible to contact companies interested in working on the demolition or collection of the waste materials? Data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency reports that “600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United States in 2018, which is more than twice the amount of generated municipal solid waste” and “just over 455 million tons of C&D debris were directed to next use and just under 145 million tons were sent to landfills.”1
Biologic reprocessing – Architects can propose spaces designed for the management of organic matter. If well-designed, these spaces will be less unappealing. As mentioned by the Drivers of Change “Biomass can be used in biorefinery operations to produce valuable chemicals, fuels and feedstocks.”2
Designing to store no organic waste – It is not only biological material that can be burnt. According to the Drivers of Change website “35 countries incinerate municipal waste on a significant scale; this 170 million tons of waste incinerated per year generates the energy equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil.”3 It is known that a lot of attention needs to be directed towards any kind of trash burning due to the emission of chemicals and carbon dioxide. That said, there already are ways to filter all the pollution before it reaches the air. Technology has improved to a point that trash has become an exciting source of study. These are some of the technologies that soon can improve our architectural choices.
Transform Carbon dioxide into raw material – MIT (Massachusetts Institute of technology) developed a material that can react with carbon dioxide from the air. The engineers affirm that the material can “grow, strengthen, and even repair itself.” The expectation is to develop the technology so it can be used as “a construction or repair material or for protective coating”4
Transform Carbon dioxide into fuel through photovoltaic panels – The technology developed by NASA can “convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (C02) into fuel by using solar-powered, thin-film devices.”5
Catalytic Pyrolysis of plastic Waste – An article from Biomass Magazine reported that the Polymer Energy LLC, a division of Northern Technologies International Corp developed a technology that can convert 78% of the plastic used in this process into liquid hydrocarbons, coke and gas.6
The increase of the use of recycled plastic can motivate the extraction of fossil materials, which is not the solution for our global warming problem. According to the Wildlife and Countryside Link, “In 1950, the world’s population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tons of plastic; in 2016, a global population of more than 7 billion people produced over 320 million tons of plastic. This is set to double by 2034”, another grim number brought by Surfers Against Sewage website shows that “Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans.”7
The fact is: people are not going to stop using plastic until we make new material that acts as efficiently and is as economically feasible as plastic can perform. And, something needs to be done with the 91% of the plastic that has not been recycled. According to National Geographic “Of the 8.3 billion metric tons that has been produced, 6.3 billion metric tons has become plastic waste. Of that, only nine percent has been recycled.”8
This blog has no intention of defining one way to solve the complex relationship between waste and architecture but mainly opens the discussion for what can be done now to clean the planet rather than just research for new materials. Unfortunately, there is a waste inheritance that present and future generations need to be cognizant of regarding its existence and dealing with it.
Every evolution is a balance of capitalists, people and our planet’s needs. The more informed our communities become of how choices inside architecture offices affect the planet, the more chances there are of making a difference little by little.
~Nathalia
Sources:
Header source: https://www.cdeglobal.com/case-studies/velde-pukk-stavanger-norway
1https://www.epa.gov/smm/sustainable-management-construction-and-demolition-materials
2http://www.driversofchange.com/#waste-technological-biological-reprocessing
3http://www.driversofchange.com/#waste-technological-waste-to-energy
4https://news.mit.edu/2018/self-healing-material-carbon-air-1011
5https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/TOP2-160#
6http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/2067/power-and-fuel-from-plastic-wastes
7https://www.wcl.org.uk/riding-the-awareness-wave-on-marine-pollution.asp
7.2https://www.sas.org.uk/our-work/plastic-pollution/plastic-pollution-facts-figures
8https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/whopping-91-percent-plastic-isnt-recycled/
