Combating global warming/climate change via reduction of CO₂ emission of buildings

Abstract

There’s been a significant increase in Natural disasters in the world today, which is as a result of global warming/climate change. Besides other contributors, buildings are high contributors to this, studies have shown that they are the largest energy consumers and greenhouse gases emitters in both developed and developing countries. This study is aimed at determining the extent to which the CO2 emission of a typical modern building can be reduced so as to help combat global warming/climate change, through reviewing related literature/data gotten from other researchers. Building embodied energy was critically analyzed, and it was observed that it can be more or less depending on the initial embodied energy of the building. The building materials embodied energy, which constitutes the initial indirect embodied energy of the building, can be significantly reduced by the use of environmentally friendly building materials which will in turn reduce the building initial embodied energy and eventually, the building embodied energy. This study tends to recommend that the commonly used ordinary Portland cement with high embodied energy should be totally replaced with fly Ash, as well as the replacement of the hollow concrete block with Autoclave Aerated Concrete (AAC) blocks which is a derivative of Fly-Ash. It also recommends the introduction of green vegetation within and around the building envelop, to help minimize the CO2 emitted by the buildings as much as possible, in the course of running and maintaining them.

Experimental investigation on the mechanical behaviour of AAC blocks for sustainable concrete masonry

“…Therefore, one of the most efficient strategies for the reduction of greenhouse gases produced by space heating is the adoption of products with increased thermal insulation performances [1][2][3]. Among them, Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) is becoming a quite common solution for the realization of sustainable concrete masonry units (CMUs), to be used in the construction of new buildings, as well as in the retrofitting of existing ones [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. AAC is a porous lightweight concrete whose cellular structure is generally obtained through a gas-producing chemical reaction of sand, lime, gypsum, and cement slurry, with the addition of an expanding agent (usually aluminium powder).…”