Building for a Sustainable Future: Energy Consumption in Construction

This article provides some support information that is needed to understand the topic of the chat no. 2 that focuses on how to reduce energy consumption in housings.

To build a sustainable future, we must first understand that every single aspect of our daily lives has an impact on the environment. We must take responsibility for understanding this impact and changing our behaviour accordingly.

Buildings are often overlooked when people think of the impact of their lives on the environment. Do you know the effect of your home and school on the environment? It is huge. Buildings use 40% of the energy consumed in the EU, and as you hopefully know, energy consumption is one of the major causes of greenhouse gas emissions. If we can make the buildings in which we live, work and study more energy-efficient, we can go a long way towards protecting the climate.

The question of energy-efficient buildings poses a twin challenge: the renovation of existing buildings and the construction of new buildings from scratch. This chat will focus on the first challenge, that of helping existing inefficient buildings make better use of energy.

This chat will be hosted by an expert from the company Luwoge, who specialise in making existing buildings more energy-efficient.

So what does Luwoge do to these buildings to make them more energy-efficient? They use a variety of well-established techniques to improve the energy performance of buildings. These include:

• Thermal insulation. Over its lifetime plastics building insulation delivers energy savings of 150 times the energy needed for its production. Only 70 litres of oil are needed to produce one cubic metre of plastic for roof insulation. Yet this one cubic metre will save approximately 5,500 litres of heating oil in just 50 years, while sparing the atmosphere some 19,000 kg of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Quite apart from its energy-saving properties, insulation promotes both comfort and health – by improving noise insulation, for example.
• Heating and cooling systems. These systems allow sophisticated regulation of the temperature inside a building, reducing energy consumption and emissions. There are many different types of systems, such as controlled ventilation systems with thermal recovery, or a thermal radiation system that can be integrated into the windows. Even under extremely cold weather conditions inhabitants still enjoy cosy warmth. These systems achieve a comfortable interior temperature faster and with less energy than conventional heating systems. These sorts of system mean that radiators are no longer necessary for heating. 
• The combination of these measures with additional methods such as triple-glazed windows enable fuel consumption and CO2 emissions to be reduced by up to 80% compared to a building that doesn’t use these techniques.

These improvements do not just have environmental benefits. The improved energy-efficiency saves significant money for inhabitants in terms of heating costs, and adds significantly to the value of the building itself by installing cutting-edge green technology. It also provides jobs and increases the competitiveness of the building sector. Everybody wins! Perhaps most importantly, this all provides a strong incentive for businesses and homeowners to invest in energy-efficient refurbishments for their buildings.

Perhaps the most important message to take away is that the technology already exists to allow us to make significant changes to the environmental impact of our buildings. We simply need to make more effective use of them.

This chat will hopefully inspire you to come up with your own vision of how we can make better buildings for the future. One of mankind’s greatest achievements has been the development of materials and technology to provide shelter and keep us safe, and with your ideas we can continue improving our quality of life and safeguarding the planet in the years to come.

Related resources

1. 3LitreHouse
This is an exe file to download on your computer. It is a Macromedia Flash application which may enable your students to watch a demonstration on reducing energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and heating costs.

2. Reducing energy consumption in buildings: How plastics help? (Past chat)
Read the chat transcript (PDF).

3. Did you know that building with plastics saves energy and money, and protects the environment?
Although you may not realise it, plastics are a very important material in the building sector. In fact, roughly 20% of all the plastics used in Europe are used for products in the building industry. And after packaging, the building industry is the second highest user of plastics!