Sustainable technologies for the building construction industry
- Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
As the dawn of the twenty-first century approaches, the current pattern of unsustainable, inequitable and unstable asymmetric demographic and economic growth has forced many segments of society to come together in facing a critical challenge: how can societies across the world meet their current basic human needs, aspirations and desires, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs? At the core of this challenge is the question: how can the human race maintain in perpetuity a healthy, physically attractive and biologically productive environment. The development path that we have been taking, in the past few centuries, has been ultimately detrimental to the health of our surrounding ecological context. We are consuming an increasing share of the natural resources available to use on this planet, and we are creating sufficiently large amounts of waste and pollution such that the earth can no longer assimilate our wastes and recover from the negative impacts. This is a result of a growing population as well as new technologies which make it easier for use to access natural resources and also require the consumption of more resources. Unsustainable technology has been the result of linear rather than cyclic thinking. The paradigm shift from linear to cyclic thinking in technological design is the crux of the shift from unsustainability to sustainability. This paper discusses the implications for the building design and construction industries. Strategies, technologies, and opportunities are presented to improve the sustainability of the built environment.
- Research Organization:
- Georgia Inst. of Tech., Atlanta, GA (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 416175
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9511214-; ON: DE96011051; TRN: 96:006564-0013
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Designing for the global environment, Atlanta, GA (United States), 2-3 Nov 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Designing for the global environment; PB: 176 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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