To Slash Building Emissions, Biomaterials Are Our Friends
April 10th, 2024

Via Anthropocene Magazine, an article on new research that indicates swapping conventional insulation with straw or hemp, and firing up wood pellets or a heat pump for warmth could slash Swiss building emissions by almost 90 percent:

Buildings should be front and center in efforts to tackle climate change. Buildings account for 40 percent of global energy demand and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Efforts to renovate buildings to make them more energy-efficient are slowly underway. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Switzerland take a deeper look at two common renovation strategies: changing the fossil fuel-based heating system and better building insulation.

Their finding: switching to heat pumps or wood pellets, and the use of bio-?based insulation materials such as straw or hemp could slash greenhouse gas emissions of buildings in Switzerland by up to 87 percent.

Routes to decrease the carbon footprint include a host of technologies. Electric heat pumps are promising, and are starting to make headway in Japan, Europe and the UK. Researchers and companies are also developing better cooling technologies, smart windows that save energy use, better paints and coatings, and bio-based insulating materials.

The team from ETH Zürich addresses the question of how to renovate a building so that its greenhouse gas emissions are minimal over its entire lifecycle. They used an AI-based model to identify the best renovation strategies for the most impact. They take into account emissions and cost related to the strategies, but also uncertainties related to the evolution of climate, costs, and user behaviors.

 

Recommended Reading:
Carbon-Negative Construction

 

Switzerland has about 1.8 million residential buildings and a further million non-residential ones. For their study, the researchers chose six buildings that have not changed much since they were first built between 1911 and 1988.

Carbon emissions from the manufacture of conventional insulation materials can be high enough sometimes to cancel out the positive effects they have on energy consumption.

So for each building, they calculated the emissions from various renovation strategies over a 60-year building life cycle, starting at the time of the renovation. This included replacing existing heating systems with those powered by gas, wood pellets, or a heat pump. The other strategy they analyzed was conventional insulation materials such as fiberglass as well as bio-based insulation materials made from straw or hemp.

“As the energy consumption of residential buildings in Switzerland is, on average, closely aligned with that of Northern European countries, it makes Switzerland an informative case study for exploring energy retrofitting scenarios in Europe,” the authors write.

Source: Alina Galimshina et al. Strategies for robust renovation of residential buildings in Switzerland. Nature Communications, 2024.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 10th, 2024 at 10:03 am and is filed under Green Design, Resilient Infrastructure.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  Both comments and pings are currently closed. 

Comments are closed.


ABOUT
BLACK SWANS GREEN SHOOTS
Black Swans / Green Shoots examines the collision between urbanization and resource scarcity in a world affected by climate change, identifying opportunities to build sustainable cities and resilient infrastructure through the use of revolutionary capital, increased awareness, innovative technologies, and smart design to make a difference in the face of global and local climate perils.

'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.

'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.

It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.