BUILDING DESIGN AND ITS IMPACT ON ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Building Design and Its Impact on Environmental Sustainability



Building Design and Its Impact on Environmental Sustainability

Introduction

In providing water supply and waste management systems for buildings, it is essential that performance is assured. Key functions encompass: the provision of potable water and that required for basic hygiene; the removal of water that has been contaminated with waste products; and the provision of a physical barrier between the potentially harmful miasma present in drain pipes and sewers and the habitable space. It is also important that the building uses to best benefit, any impinging rainwater as well as any resultant wastewater, thus reducing unnecessary wastage and limiting the loading on sewer and drainage networks and/or collection systems. Sustainability should underpin design theory in each of these aspects through limiting water supply and consumption, and through reducing material use, cost and environmental impact. Water supply and drainage systems for buildings therefore provide a number of opportunities for the integration of sustainable solutions, however, these must be achieved without compromising performance, and thus, the response of systems during use must be fully understood.

Often the approach adopted for the design of water and wastewater systems is based upon the application of steady-state principles in order to determine, for example, flow loading or pressure response. Although such methods facilitate system specification in a somewhat deterministic fashion, they seldom provide the opportunity to assess the time-dependent response of systems - information that can readily inform key design decisions. The following text will therefore illustrate how an understanding of the dynamic response of systems coupled with the development, at Heriot-Watt, of a suite of numerical simulation models has facilitated the effective and efficient design and analysis of water supply and drainage for buildings, thereby enabling a comprehensive assessment of the potential for integration of innovative and sustainable design solutions. It is worth noting at this point that, throughout this paper, the term 'water supply' will be presented within the context of water use within the building that, indirectly, dictates supply from large scale networks.

According to the conclusions of [1] the construction industry sector consumes up to 60% of all raw materials extracted from the Earth. Furthermore, transformation of these raw materials into construction materials generates roughly 50% of all atmospheric emissions of CO2. There is therefore an onus on the architectural and engineering professions to integrate environmental protection mechanisms into their work, so as to comply fully with environmental requirements [2].

Initiatives have emerged in various countries to construct buildings that are increasingly environmentally friendly throughout their entire life cycle: from the extraction of the raw materials up until their demolition. Thus, we now use terms such as sustainable construction, building energetic efficiency, bioclimatism, passive architecture and so on, which target new ways of curtailing the environmental impact of construction activity. The concept of sustainable development, which is seen as politically correct and desirable for society as a whole [3], makes the incorporation of these design criteria into construction activities all the more ...