Drew Dodson
SHM 352.001
Design Term Paper
May 21, 2014
Environmentally preferable products (EPP) and their services offer society much more benefit to our safety and health than their competition. These products allow us to build environmentally friendly architecture while still offering safe stability in its construction. EPP offers reduced effects on human health by looking for cleaner alternative methods as their more harmful counterparts. These products have a wide scope of use including products from manufacturing and distribution, to maintenance and disposal.
The goal of EPP products is to reduce consumption of material while building new and improved architecture by recycling earth’s natural resources. As builders and as a society we are now researching alternatives that can be made from more recyclable content. This allows fewer components of newly made goods that essentially waste our planets valuable resources and replaces them with material already present. This allows us to reduce the ache and hassle of making new products and having to deal with their negative life cycle impacts. This can cut building costs and help promote a healthier, safer, and more sustainable earth for the next generations of life.
There are two major requirements when picking environmentally preferable products. The first requirement comes in local production area and mandates the use of “products that were extracted, processed, and manufactured locally for the following components; framing, aggregate for concrete and foundation, drywall or interior sheathing” (U.S Green Building Council). These goods are required to contain 90% of the EPP product being substituted. The second requirement, quite like the first consists of different materials...
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...very day that can perhaps take precedence over the current products that are in place. This is why EPP products will always be comparative, until the absolute best earthly product is found.
The services that EPP products provide humans and the environment expand way farther than most people can fathom. Each EPP product has the potential to replace the next inefficient product. The world and the global economy is rapidly changing because of EPP, in building and construction it has quickly taken the reins on what society views as a valuable good. With the research being performed by the EPA and other agencies, I don’t see EPP products taking a backseat again anytime soon.
Bibliography
"Environmentally Preferable Products." U.S. Green Building Council. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 May 2014.
"Frequent Questions." EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. Web. 28 May 2014.
The environment and the health of the surrounding population go hand in hand. The Environmental Protection Agency takes on this ever so important mission of protecting them both. The mission statement of the EPA states, “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Small Business Programs is to support the protection of human health and the environment by advocating and advancing the business, regulatory, and environmental compliance concerns of small and socio-economically disadvantaged businesses, and minority academic institutions (US Enviromental Protection Agency, 2010).” The impact of its mission can be defined clearly as it examines the impact of contamination in the air, the water, and the land on human health.
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. (2004, August 11). Environmental Roadmapping Initiative. Retrieved October 14, 2011, from Plastics Impacts, Risks and Regulations: http://ecm.ncms.org/ERI/new/IRRPlastics.htm
Although Maniates labels the “A” in IWAC as “meaningful consumption Alternatives,” his thoughts on the matter refer more to the institutional influences on product development. In Woodhouse’s words, “The public’s failure to embrace sustainable technologies has more to do with institutional structures that restrict the aggressive development and wide dissemination of sustainable technologies than with errant consumer choice” (48). Instead of attributing the lack of environmentally friendly products to happenstance, Maniates claims that there are production-side structural aspects which hinder the development of green products. Woodhouse mirrors Maniates in this aspect by recognizing the influences on engineers to overlook environmental concerns. “Neither law nor professional norms make [sustainable] design tasks a required aspect of most engineers’ responsibilities, and most employers place substantial obstacles in the way of engineers taking those design elements farther than law and market competition require” (27). By and large, companies are driven by the desire to maximize profit above all else, and from the perspective of employers, adding in environmental concerns is merely an additional constraint on potential profit margins. If engineering ethics and government regulations are sufficiently detailed on sustainability, then employers
In addition, the plastics have shown to generate more damage to the environment in the long-term than any other sources of energy. So, it becomes our responsibility to preserve the environment creating mass awareness. The practice of bio-plastics are an environment friendly method, which doesn’t use the landfills while recycling and deposition, but it is also not that convenient method because the cost of manufacturing bio-plastics are much higher than ordinary method. This directly indicates that the cost of minimizing the waste, the cost of human health and environmental pollution is much higher than the production of
In recent development, sustainability has become an integral concern in the performance of architectural principles and technology, in which conscious approaches to energy and ecological conservation involves strategies during the design, construction, and operation of buildings. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Building Sector is the largest contributor to most of the energy consumed: in the United States by itself, buildings consume 47.6% of all energy produced and is responsible for 44.6% of CO2 emissions in 2010 (“Problem…” 1). In terms of sustainability, initial decisions in the design process can significantly help deliver results. Evaluations and explorations through the impact of materials, such as concrete, wood, bricks, masonry, and steel, can help improve reductions in energy through its applicability to a building. While wood and steel are simply identified for their strength, durability, and functionality in structures, accentuating these materials’ embodied energies and recyclability offer a more comprehensive understanding of their overall impact in sustainability — and ultimately reveal how both have advantages and disadvantages depending on the context.
Societal needs of designing and delivering products and services that can better serve a more sustainable environment.
High recyclability – this results in less natural resources used, less waste and emissions used
Vandecasteele, C. & van der Sloot, H. A., 2011. Sustainable management of waste and recycled materials in construction. Waste Management, Volume 31, pp. 199-200.
The future for these products is also quite often over looked. The components are not made to be detachable, so the different materials cannot be recycled correctly or recycled at all, which leads to landfills and pollution. Every material, from wood to steel to carbon fibre has an environmental story behind it and these can all be reused, however there is quite often not enough thought into this design aspect. These components are not labelled correctly for recycling and the result is a scarred landscape. However recycling these days has now turned into a way of life for us. Bins are now everywhere marked with the unmistakeable ‘three-green-arrow’ (another remarkable graphic design – now playing a huge role in the way we live), which lets members of the public kn...
[7] ¬Holdway, R., Walker, D. and Hilton, M. (2002) Eco-design and successful packaging, Design Management Journal. (pp. 45 – 53)
are required and less energy is needed to make recycled plastic products than to make
The use of green materials is better for the environment because they have a positive impact on the planet. Looking at our environment today we see a place that has been facing a massive climate change. Scientists have been concerned over global warming for decades. The ongoing increase of the earth’s temperature is believed to be caused by the greenhouse effect (“Global Warming” 27). Building with green materials produces significantly lower greenhouse gas emission. Specifically, wood as a material for building products, requires considerably less energy than other building products such as steel and concrete. Wood product manufacture results in fewer greenhouse gas and other air-polluting emissions (“Green Building Benefits”). Green building also results in waste reduction. In the United States, construction and demolition creates a huge amount of solid waste. Green building limits the waste prod...
Buildings consume a variety of materials in their construction. Green design reduces the dependence on resource intensive products and materials. Today, there are an increasing number of products available made from efficient, earth-friendly, or recycled materials. In a green building, consideration is also given to the construction process itself. Materials that minimize waste or can be recycled, help contribute to an efficient and environmentally sensitive construction process.
Annie Leonard, in her book The Story of Stuff, says that companies can significantly reduce their toll on the environment by changing their design. The design determines “the amount of energy used in making and using the product,” “the length of the product’s life span” and “its ability to be recycled” (Leonard). All these things determine the amount of resources a company must use, so simply changing a product’s design is one way a company can have a large impact on the sustainability of the environment in which it operates. One example of this is that “Wal-Mart attributed more than $100 million of its 2009 revenue to a decision to switch to a recyclable variety of cardboard in shipments” which it sells to a recycler instead of paying to send it to a landfill (Bhanoo).
...onsidering that some of the projects may fail to incorporate EIA in their implementation process, it should be noted that such developments have significant negative consequences on the public and the environment.