Effect of sustainable building material substitutes with regard to earthquake safety

Abstract

Due to the speed-up in processes of urbanization in developing countries large quantities of building materials are needed to construct the built environment. Mining activities to produce building materials lead to land-use conflicts, which negatively affect food security and degrade the environment, while consuming a large amount of energy. This leads us to an increasing recognition that resource efficient alternatives in building construction must be explored. However, fast growing cities in Countries like India are also frequently located in earthquake prone areas. Therefore, earthquake safety must always be taken into account when considering reduction of building material consumption. Simultaneously, thermal power stations produce a large volume of fly ash waste, which could be used to produce sustainable building materials as substitutes. Studies on the impact of building material substitution on reachable quantities of saved resources taking technical issues regarding the safety buildings into account are currently lacking. The contribution introduces a first case study on building material substitutes in different Indian buildings, comparing the bill of materials arising from the commonly built structure with ordinary brick masonry and potential material substitutes. The results show, that the use of alternate materials may results in a considerable amount of reduction in material.