Abstract
Dwellings are material intensive products. To date, material use in dwellings has been investigated mainly using economic (exogenous) or dwelling (endogenous) drivers, with few studies comprehensively combining both. For the first time, we identify a comprehensive set of such drivers of demand for building materials and analyze them using the logarithmic mean divisia index (LMDI) method. We combine the LMDI method, the concept of dynamic material flow analysis, and physical and monetary flows to decompose the demand for building materials into the following six effects: material intensity, floor area shape, dwelling type, dwelling intensity, economic output, and population. We analyze these six effects on demand for concrete in new dwellings in the U.K. from 1951 to 2014, classified into six dwelling types and four subregions. Of these six effects, the material intensity effect is the most important, overall contributing to increasing concrete demand by +79 Mt from 1950 to 2014, while the dwelling intensity effect plays an opposite role, overall reducing concrete demand from 1950 to 2014 by −56 Mt. The economic output effect is also significant (+38 Mt from 1950 to 2014). A comparative analysis of the six effects in the four U.K. nations reveals that most of the effects arise from England, while the other nations have minor effects due to their smaller populations. Our results show that changes to the demand for concrete in the U.K. fluctuate and have mainly remained between ±30 Mt year–2 from 1950 to 2014, and thus the inflows of concrete into the in-use stock of dwellings have experienced neither entirely increasing or decreasing trends during this period. This study contributes to understanding changes in resource demand due to social, economic, and technological factors and thus improves the capability to reliably and quantitatively model the use of materials in the built environment.
Highlights
Residential buildings are essential to the provision of shelter
(4) Evaluate the socio-economic indicators (e.g., population and gross value added of the construction sector (GVAC)) in different time periods and regions
(5), define the demand for building materials based on the exogenous and endogenous drivers using index decomposition analysis (IDA), and apply the logarithmic mean divisia index (LMDI) method to analyze their effects on demand for building materials
Summary
Residential buildings (hereafter dwellings) are essential to the provision of shelter. By 2050, at least 20 billion m2 of additional floor area will be needed to provide shelter for 9.7 billion people, up from 235 billion m2 in 2016.1 They are responsible for at least 19% of energy-related CO2 emissions,[1] of which an increasing fraction will be associated with the embodied component of their life cycles as operational CO2 emissions reduce.[2,3] The growing understanding of the importance of material efficiency in climate change mitigation has further increased attention toward building materials.[4−7]. The most common building materials include concrete, steel, bricks, timber, and glass.[8,9] Their raw materials, e.g., limestone, gravel, iron ore, clay, wood, and sand, tend to be abundant on the global level and relatively inexpensive.[10−12] construction minerals such as quarried natural aggregates (e.g., gravel, sand) may have local availability constraints.[13].
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