Assessing Material Efficiency and Impacts in Buildings (AMEIB)

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The construction industry remains locked onto an unsustainable trajectory of runaway environmental impacts unless it rapidly transforms the materials it produces and uses. Cement production may alone comprise a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 2050, up from ~8% today. Construction materials (cement, concrete, bricks, steel, etc.) are mainly used in buildings.This project - Assessing Materials Efficiency and Impacts in Buildings (AMEIB) - addresses this challenge to sustainably transform materials use in the built environment, focusing on buildings and all major construction materials. AMEIB will develop a novel multiscale material flow impact analysis (MFIA) algorithm that directly and quantitatively integrates resource availability, industrial ecology, and materials science. Applications of the MFIA algorithm will identify scenarios and materials that approach maximal efficiency and minimal life cycle environment impacts (e.g., CO2 emissions) in buildings, across the UK. These results will benchmark the extent to which impacts related to buildings can be reduced through materials efficiency measures, providing guidance to policymakers, low impact technologies for industry, and research targets for materials scientists.The novel systems and materials uncovered by AMEIB will pioneer the 'materials efficient city'. AMEIB lays the foundation for follow-up work to apply this MFIA approach globally and also across all industrial sectors. Therefore, AMEIB provides a significant step towards holistic analysis and implementation of materials efficiency in the built environment, rational management of industry-wide resource use and impacts, and also 'sustainable urban development'.