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Here are few examples of construction materials that cause a minimum impact on the environment.

There are plenty of various ways that a building's material can affect the overall environmental impact of a building. On one level, we can consider the material itself, but we also cannot overlook the performance of the material as well, and how that performance will ultimately affect a building's environmental impact. Here is the most reliable construction supply online shop to get you construction supplies.

Considering simply the material itself, we can look at it from a few different lenses. One way to reduce the impact is to build with natural, renewable elements like wood, straw bale, cob, stucco, brick, etc. These materials are typically non-toxic and will return to the earth fairly easily if left exposed to the elements. An added benefit to both wood and the straw bale is that they serve to sequester carbon providing an atmospheric benefit. Stone is also a natural material, typically non-toxic, but unless the reclaimed stone is being used, it's generally being carved out of a mountain which can leave great scars on the earth and destroy habitat.

The next step is recycled materials, like steel and aluminum, which can be reused again and again, but not without significant energy. This brings this to another way to measure environmental performance in materials by its embodied energy. The embodied energy is an analysis of the energy that goes into making a building product. Steel, with is required mining, smelting, molding, has a much higher embodied energy than wood. A material with some of the highest embodied energy and negative environmental impact is rigid foam insulation which brings us to the performance aspect.

Rigid foam insulation, while quite toxic, continues to be used in green buildings because it is a powerful and efficient insulator (efficient in this case referring to the amount of insulating power or "R-value", you get from relatively narrow material depth). In some climates, where there is a high need to heat and cool homes, it’s important to consider the life cycle cost. If your building is built out of all-natural materials but you need to crank the heat and the A.C. twice as much as a consequence, those materials may not have been the best choice in the long run.

That said, there has been a lot of progress lately to build smarter, and the right architect will balance these various needs of the building, user, and climate to make the best material choice.

Other things that can be made to decrease the influence buildings have on the environment are to build more inadequate, reuse current structures rather than tear down and build new, use more energy-efficient HVAC systems, use plumbing fixtures that consume more limited water, harvest the rainwater from the rooftop and utilize it for irrigation, and several other things.

Besides farming, constructing dams, and constructing roads, constructing buildings is probably one of the things that we as a civilization do that has the greatest influence on the environment.

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