Abstract
Population growth in cities leads to high raw material consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In temperate climates were heating of buildings is among the major contributors to greenhouse gases, thermal insulation of buildings became a standard in recent years. Both population growth and greenhouse gas mitigation may thus have some influence on the quantity and composition of building material stock in cities. By using the case study of Vienna, this influence is evaluated by calculating the stock of major building materials (concrete, bricks, mortar, and plaster, steel, wood, glass, mineral wool, and polystyrene) between the years 1990 and 2015. The results show a growth of the material stock from 274 kt in the year 1990 to 345 kt in the year 2015, resulting in a total increase of 26%. During the same period, the population grew by 22%. On a material level, the increase of thermal insulation materials like polystyrene and mineral wool by factors of 6.5 and 2.5 respectively were much higher than for other materials, indicating energy efficiency and greenhouse gas mitigation in the building construction sector. The displacement of brickwork by concrete as the most important construction material, however, is rather a response to population growth as concrete buildings can be raised faster. A question for the future is to which extent this change from brickwork to high carbon-intensive concrete countervails the achievements in greenhouse gas reduction by thermal insulation.
Highlights
In temperate climates were heating of buildings is among the major contributors to greenhouse gases, thermal insulation of buildings became a standard in recent years
Buildings play a particular role, as the raw materials used for their construction, the waste from their demolition and renovation, as well as the greenhouse gases (GHGs) from their heating and cooling are responsible for the bulk of these resource consumptions and emissions from urban areas [4,5,6]
In Vienna, this decrease was even larger with −39%, making the building sector to be only responsible for 18% of GHG emissions in the city, compared to 29% in the year 1990 [9]
Summary
A large number of studies on the materials flows and stocks in building sector have been performed, and many of these have used some form of material flow analysis (MFA) model to estimate the respective material flows [11,20,23,27,28]. For this reason, MFA is used to develop, illustrate, and calculate the material flows and stocks in buildings in Vienna, using the MFA terms as described by Brunner and Rechberger (2016) [29]. The MIs used in this study refer to our previous work on buildings in Vienna [15]
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