Question: if building from an environmentally friendly material how much difference can it make

Stephen Richardson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

Hi Wombat – thats a good question!
You first need to decide how you’re measuring the difference before you can say how much different it will make.
In my work, I focus on the greenhouse gas emissions which are what cause climate change but you could also look at lots of other things like the gases that cause acid rain or there are other gases that damage the ozone layer.
But lets just stick to greenhouse gases for now!
We know that buildings produce about half of all the man-made greenhouse gases. And about one third (or 30%) of that is due to the materials that the building is made from.
So if we use some easy numbers we can see what kind of difference we can make. I’ll pretend that all the man made greenhouse gases add up to 100. About 15 of those 100 are from building materials.
So if we use more environmentally friendly materials, we could make that much less. We might be able to change 15 into just 5. That means that we have reduced the totatl of 100 we started with down to 90.
So that example shows that we might be able to save 10% of all man made greenhouse gases by using more environmentally friendly materials to build with.
Of course to do that, everyone around the whole world would need to change their materials – so it’s nott an easy job!
I hope that all makes some sense?!