Green Building Materials and Processes: New Approaches to Structures and Paved Surfaces. Mountains of waste around the world are being mined for processing into building materials. Such as: “10 Recycled Building Materials of the Future”. www.climatebiz.com 1/7/22. “Top Recycled Building Materials That Are Changing the World”. www.buildgreennh.com 1/26/22. “11 Eco-friendly House Building Materials Based on Waste”. www.medium.com 1/25/17. “9 Building Materials Made Entirely From Waste Products”. www.internewx.com 12/20/17. “Using Waste as Alternative Construction Materials”. www.marsh.com 9/1/21.
Alternative Sustainable Building Materials: Papercrete”. www.arcace.ca 8/21/22. “Seven Waste Products Being Salvaged For Your Next Construction Project”. www.buildwithrise.com/stories/waste-products-for-construction-materials 5/1/21. The waste items mentioned in this article include coffee husks, plastic water bottles, old jeans, wine corks, tree bark, recycled glass, and miscellaneous plastic scraps. A company in Colombia – Conceptos Plasticos – recycles plastic into LEGO-like building blocks that families can use to easily construct their own homes. www.conceptosplasticos.com “These LEGO-like Recycled Plastic Bricks Create Sturdy Homes for Just $5,200. www.inhabitat.com 7/22/16. “Plastics Could Help Build a Sustainable Future”. www.theconversation.com 8/12/20. To help bring down the labor costs involved in building new housing, 3D printing is being up-scaled to the level of constructing new houses and other buildings: “ICON’s ‘House Zero’ is 3D-printed with Lavacrete Walls”. www.techeblog.com 3/4/22. And “What It’s Really Like to Live in a 3D-printed Home”. www.dwell.com 5/23/22. The Dwell article involves an energy-efficient, solar-powered home. Green concrete is CO2-enriched concrete. Solidia Technologies of Piscataway NJ provides 2 core technologies: a sustainable cement manufacturing technology, and a sustainable concrete curing technology, that cures concrete with CO2 instead of water. www.solidiatech.com . “Fixing Cement’s Carbon Problem” . www.canarymedia.com 11/17/22. This article lists several other stories on this subject, including in The New York Times, Bloomberg, E&E News, and Canary Media. There’s also: “Laying the Foundation for Zero-carbon Cement”. www.mckinsey.com 5/14/20. Like concrete, steel manufacturing is a major GHG emitter. But help is on the way: “Green Steel: Swedish Company Ships First Batch Made Without Using Coal”. www.theguardian.com 8/18/21. “Boston Metal and ArcelorMittal Take Different Routes to Green Steel”. www.cleantechnica.com 6/4/22. And “Steel Giant Comes Out Swinging Against Fossil Fuel”. www.cleantechnica.com 5/26/22. Describes substituting green hydrogen to reduce the usage of methane (natural gas) normally used to process iron in Canada. And “Inside the Bill Gates-backed Startup Cleaning Up the Steel Industry”. www.bloomberg.com 10/6/22. The greater volume of wood used as a building material would lessen the level of carbon-intensive materials used in construction. “Wooden Buildings Could Eliminate 106 Billion Tons of Carbon Emissions”. www.cleantechnica.com/page/5/ “New Process Yields Super Strong Recycled Wood”. www.cleantechnica.com 5/31/22. And also re. Wood: “Transparent Wood Could Be the Window of the Future”. www.usda.gov 7/29/21. This article describes windows (the panes, not the frames) made from clear, transparent, high thermal value wood. The decarbonizing of cities can be assisted by the type of paving materials used, as well as by the color or reflectivity of the roofs of city buildings: “Soak Up the Rain: Permeable Pavement”. www.epa.gov Permeable paved ground surfaces can help reduce rainwater runoff by infiltrating rain water and melting snow, allowing it to seep through the surface down to underlying layers of soil and gravel. Permeable pavements can also help filter out pollutants that contribute to water pollution. Also: “Cities Need New Types of Pavement Capable of Absorbing a Flood. This Team Has a Customized Recipe”. www.anthropocenemagazine.com. 5/31/22. In addition to pavement permeability, people involved with climate action in cities should also be aware of pavement reflectiveness. Those big black asphalt parking lots at the regional mall or nearby industrial park are heating up the planet as well. When short wave light radiation hits a black or dark surface, it is converted to long wave heat radiation. So as a part of the fight to cool the planet, white or otherwise reflective surfaces should always be the first choice. This goes for roof surfaces as well as ground coverings. See “Streetbond” at www.streetbond.com . Streetbond’s reflective coating is a paint for asphalt that keeps pavement, and our atmosphere, cooler by reflecting incoming solar rays back into space. Also: “Can White Roofs Help Cool World’s Warming Cities?”. www.preventionweb.net 3/7/18.