Regulating natural resource consumption in the construction sector using emergy model

Abstract

The rising demand for infrastructural facilities and housing units across the world has resulted in increased pressure on environment due to the uncontrolled and unregulated exploitation of natural resources. A sustainable resource use framework for the construction industry is essential to ensure the regional economic progress without compromising environmental sustainability. Judicious regulation of the resource use is possible only through evolving appropriate parameters to represent the resource consumptive pattern that could be used both by the planners and the regulators. In this connection, several tools and techniques have emerged that are used to assess the resource use and suggest both the economic and environmental implications of the material choice. Among them, emergy analysis has been successfully used to understand the current state of resource use and its associated impacts on the environment. The current form of emergy based descriptions are independent of the time scale and hence a real-time evaluation of the impact of material use often turns out to be unsuccessful. The environmental damages that are reported in these regions are often due to the uncontrolled rate of extraction and the emergy evaluations need to incorporate the rate of extraction of resources across different time scales. An approach to estimate the emergy at different time scales based on the prevailing consumption rates is proposed in this paper which would enable the regulators/planners to assess the current resource use pattern and suggest alternate pathways of material use to ensure the sustainability of construction sector.