Sustainable building management by using alternative materials and techniques

Abstract

Nowadays house construction is the basic need all over the world. Since the conventional building materials are causing degradation of the environment and also inadequate, it must be replaced by alternative building materials which are environment friendly or efficient. The mining of popular fine aggregates and quarrying of coarse aggregate results in depletion of hard rock and environmental imbalance. In view of this, there is need for developing alternative material. In most industrialized countries, the building sector accounts about one-third of total energy consumption. In order to ease this problem radical improvement is employed in building energy efficiency management. The framework design is in such a way so that it can balance between the issues such as environmental, economic and social issues. This is achieved by altering the construction method and materials used for any conventional building. The objective is to promote alternative materials to housing in such a way, that if compared with conventional materials it should prove to be an ideal alternative. Using alternative building materials save manufacturing cost, transportation, energy, time and these materials have high potential in replacing the conventional materials without compromising the strength and durability. Use of alternative technology is advantageous as it uses the locally accessible raw materials, waste products obtained from industry, etc. In this study, we have considered conventional building materials with alternative building materials by taking a residential project of 2340 SFT (including ground and first floor) and an industrial project of 3100 SFT. The cost reduction is found to be 20.17 and 18.19% in residential building and industrial building respectively hence ensuring that they are cost-effective and energy-efficient. Similarly, the reduction in embodied energy consumption is found to be 38.72% in residential and 17.78% in industrial building which shows that the utilization of alternative materials in construction ensures the building as eco-friendly. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.