GSI review part 2 Flashcards
Why are buildings an environmental problem and represent a challenge for environmental assessment?
They are huge sources of wastewater and emissions. Huge industrial AC due to little ventilation or bad insulation. Each building is unique and can be hard to make a general assessment with any given buildings. Ex: cement may come from differing plants
What are the critical factors to analyze buildings?
SAFETY, FUNCTIONALITY, AND COST! (from ppt)
Wastewater (is it recycled?)
Materials (steel vs concrete), where are these materials coming from?
Insulation and ventilation (has an effect on AC and heating demand)
Definition of building? What type of building?
low-rise residential, office, laboratory,
Influence in environmental effects of the building?
utilities, owner, users, which goes back to the point you mentioned about insulation and ventilation, but also materials, energy efficient designs, electrical/natural gas use, equipment choices during construction
Service life?
How long can it be sustained?
EOL options?
Recyclable materials
Reusable materials
How do steel versus concrete buildings vary in emissions?
Concrete is more emissions. This is because it takes more energy to transport, takes
longer to build which means more machines for longer times. Also, cement is high emission of CO2 to make. Steel is faster to construct.
Environmental problems associated with recycling:
o Most not recycled, certainly not reused o No experience with recycling o Cheap raw materials o Calcination: produce cement o Hydration: setting of concrete
What is energy efficiency? How do we improve energy efficiency?
Definition: reduce the amount of energy required to provide products and services
Example: insulating a home allows a building to use less heating and cooling
Fuel economy standards
agencies and efforts
(CAFÉ), cogeneration, ETC.
How do we encourage energy efficiency?
Lowering costs of consumer products on market value and monthly use.
Example: energy star rebates and solar panels lowering electricity cost
What are Appliance labels/ product ecolabels,
regulations, energy star rebates
compare available growth models and tell us which is best.
Logistic model is best to measure population growth because it begins to plateau out modeling the limited resource availability. Exponential is also good but we can not grow exponentially forever so it’s implications are limited. Annual growth model is the worst because it increases in percent only once per year and is a “step” model. This is certainly not at all how our population growth or many growths are modeled.
Why should we be concerned about population growth?
We need sustainable development
We have a limit on natural resources and we don’t want to plunder them all
Example of pessimistic view and optimistic view.
Pessimistic view is saying that we are doomed and there’s no way to stop our impending doom. Optimistic view is that there is still time to reverse the damage we have done if we take the right steps.
