TABLE OF CONTENTS Materials are the key to sustainability in the built environment and innovative new materials will allow architects and engineers to build structures that have greater value as they are more pleasing to use, live in or look at, healthier for us and much more sustainable. Huge quantities of materials are used. Their choice profoundly affects many value properties relevant to sustainability including weight, embodied energies, fuel related and chemical emissions, lifetime energies, user comfort and health, use of recycled wastes, durability, recyclability and the properties of wastes returned to the geosphere-biosphere.
A holistic approach to sustainability in which all things possible are done is most likely to work and the built environment offers tremendous opportunities for the cultural and technical changes required. Exciting new benchmark technologies such tec and eco-cements offer a way forward and of solving the two greatest problems on the planet of global warming and waste. The direction is clear, technology can help us change the techno process. By doing so the process becomes more economic and thus self propelled with less government intervention.
Finding 3 under the heading 'Transport and Urban Design' of the recent ISOS conference in Australia applies globally. It stated in part. '...The Federal Government should promote Australian building innovations (e.g. eco-cement) that contribute global solutions towards sustainability; provide more sustainable city innovation R&D funds; and re-direct some housing and transport funds towards sustainable cities demonstration projects. [18] Technology can make it possible to achieve a far greater measure of...
