Residential Buildings Are Ruining The Environment

The effects of our creations on the world Such as homes and commercial buildings are slowly suffocating the Earth and permanently damaging the environment. Things such as greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions are harming our beautiful planet. Normally people think of things such as cars, airplanes, landfills, and the digestive systems of livestock, yet a major contributor to these greenhouse gasses are the buildings where people live and work. So, the question is: how exactly does a residential design architect’s designs affect the environment?

CO2 emissions are a major factor in the problems facing the world today, housing being a major contributor to greenhouse gasses and the theory of global warming. An article entitled “Energy & Environmental

What few know is how much of those resources are being used. For example energy, according to an article by……. called “Trend of Sustainable Residential Architecture”, “the construction sector of global economy annually consumes 50% of the total energy resources and 21% … is used in residential construction.” So, going back to an earlier subject that means that tons of tons of CO2 that are being sent into our atmosphere, ruining the world’s environments. But energy is not the only world resource used in construction of houses, “[it] consumes ⅙ of the world’s freshwater supply, ¼ of its wood harvest, and ⅖ of its fossil fuels”, so our forests, water supplies and other limited resources are being used to construct our homes and commercial buildings. In 1944, the Counseil International du Batiment made seven Principles of Sustainable Construction in an attempt to make the construction process more environmentally friendly, saying that people should start looking at “reduction of resource consumption, reusing resources, material recycling, protecting the nature, elimination of toxins, applying life-cycle cost, and focus on quality”. Reusing of resources and material recycling sound like one in the same, but are actually entirely different, reusing resources is the reusel of things like water resources and fossil fuels, while material recycling is the recycling of plastics, papers, and glasses - something few do but is readily available to everyone. Pretty simple things to reduce energy consumption in the construction phase of a building, but impactful when actually done. How many of Americans actually know about these impacts and are knowledgeable of environmental issues though? On most subjects the average American is pretty knowledgeable, but subjects that Americans, as a whole, need to learn more about so that the U.S. can have the best environmental future and a