Can we afford to ignore the Eco-Challenge? Part 1
Cities have become veritable omnivores, consuming everything that the countryside offers. Can we afford this anymore? The building industry holds the key to shifting the conversation.
It was ironic. We were congregated at a hotel no more than 3 kilometers from Mylapore, a city in its time that flourished 3000 years ago, a city that knew sanitation plans 2000 years ago, that recognized the need for retention of groundwater resources over 1000 years ago. Many centuries later, Madras was a city in 1863 that had an English traveler write approvingly of the art of city planning that characterized the Madras of then.
This meeting, hosted by CII and an association of builders in South India, was like any meeting in recent years that centred around green buildings and sustainable planning. It had people discussing the predicament that today confronts urban planners, architects, engineers of various hues, and builder-businessmen. It’s hard for all professionals and businessmen in the industry to see that building any more into the future is not going to be the same as it was in the last century. There are no precedents from the past for these demands of a future that will have our cities clogged with 2.5 times what they have had to cope with so far. Limestone for cement will exhaust in about 30 years. Making steel is going to be harder as the iron ore needed is exhausting pretty rapidly and steel companies are finding it very difficult to get mining licences thanks to resistance from local people who see the damage that mining ores causes rivers and forests and therefore their agricultural lands.
The story is dismaying all across India on the impossible growth in demand. Cities like Surat, Rajkot, Coimbatore are doubling population from one million today to two million plus in the next 20 years. Their geographic spread is doubling in almost every case. Remember they were 1/3rd their current size just 20 years ago. The infrastructure is pathetically inadequate. Their 70-year-old water and sanitation lines are already bursting at the seams. If we build more buildings just the way we have so far, neither the government nor anyone else can do anything to manage the waste we put out, the energy we need, or the water that our cities are running desperately out of.
Here is a world today that needs revolutionary solutions that go back to some of the very basic principles of how man lived before 500 years. It means a return to solutions that are local and demand self-management more than governance. It means producing and consuming as much as you can without having to transport things from vast distances. That will be a return to what Alvin Toffler called ‘prosuming’. What are such solutions before us?
Our engineers of the last 100 years were not wrong in the technologies they devised and the methods and materials they employed in building bridges, dams, office blocks, and housing colonies the way they did from before and after the advent of concrete-and-steel.
They could not have been aware of the immense depletion of resources that the planet was suffering. It was only by the 1980’s that the vulnerability of Earth dawned upon us. It is only by 2000 that the world actually began to see the impact that carbon emission is beginning to make on our atmosphere, so badly that we could be wiped out as a race in less than a century, if we don’t wake up to it now.
Most of us don’t realize that the building industry is by far the largest in the world and perhaps the most disorganized. This comes from the fact that it is in the unorganized sector. To boot, what is driven professionally by design is less than 3% of all buildings created anywhere. Nearly 50 per cent of all energy generated goes toward all those things that make our buildings—from steel and concrete, to bricks and blocks, to the making of tiles and glass and floors, paints and grills and tanks. There is another 8 per cent of such energy that is used every year by every building for just its running, be it on lighting and water, and kitchen needs in a home, or air-conditioning and other heavy-duty needs in an office or industrial plant.
So, what are green buildings about and how are they any different from buildings from the past? In a sense, all the debate and discussion on green buildings is mainly to shift the conversation of all architects and contractors and builders away from the ways they built in the past, while urging every professional stakeholder to look at those same needs of building with a sensitive eye to materials we use.
When next you sit at your laptop and work on a drawing that will eventually be created at some project site, think of the potential destruction you cause. For every 100,000 sq. ft. of a multi-stacked building, you use about 4000 cubic meters of concrete. You use about 400 tons of steel. You use 2000 cubic meters of riverbed sand which translates to about 1 sq. km. of sand that is extracted to a depth of 0.6 meters in some river outside your city.
If the drawing that you offer to your client is only about some professional business that your company gains, then there should be a law to show you how what you do is illegitimate and illegal, or even criminal!
Instead can you begin to think, as a consultant, how you could offer your clients solutions that take them away from the use of sand? How can you enable your client to look at efficiencies that ensure that he is not using 40 kg of steel for every sq m that the regular conventional structure uses given current quake zonal regulations?
How can you ensure that the blend of concrete is enhanced to a point where the building does not use 0.4 cubic meters for every square meter? How do you sensitize your client to understanding that 1 kg of cement is 1 kg of carbon put out in the atmosphere? How do you make your customer understand that concrete at the primary consumption stage means about 15 carbon kg per sq ft of a regular building? Can you sensitize the end user to how every ton of regular air-conditioning is equal to about 1.5 carbon kg for every hour of use – that’s because every single unit of electrical energy that you use up, is 1 carbon kg equivalent.
How is carbon kg calculated is outside the discussion of this feature, but it is quick, and proven.
Let’s remember there’s no favour we do to the Planet.
I meet many professionals at various forums who want to know, ‘Well, how do we apply for carbon credits and gain the money that we save by going green on building elements?’ That saving in carbon kg for a building cannot be as high as it can be for an industrial plant which uses massive units of energy every day. Any ‘saving’ has to do with what we ‘consume’. Since building is a one-time activity, unlike industrial plants, the savings on carbon emission will be relatively low and so unviable for a business to go through the entire process of validating and claiming the carbon credit. But let’s remember that going green on buildings is not about how the building industry can secure carbon credits. Green buildings are not about companies claiming that they are doing the world some good! It’s not some glorious CSR activity that the Company can claim as best practice in its annual statement. Green buildings are not about saving the world but about saving yourself from either liquidation of business at a mild level, or the liquidation of a human race in the next 300 years. The planet doesn’t need humans; we need the planet. And the myopic misdeeds of a minority few who manage financial wealth can be the decimation of the entire human race, just as a half-dozen other civilizations went into oblivion in the last 4,000 years.
Any such long-term sustainability drive that goes beyond yourself and the narrowly defined needs of your organization has to foster innovation and directions that are beyond the current pale of understanding of engineering and of architecture. What you need to do is to see that you unravel for yourself some very basic first principles of the physics of water, energy and of waste. You need to understand why you build what you build with the current spectrum of materials that you utilize. You need to see how you can discern between ‘use’, ‘utilize’, and ‘exploit’.
Today there are solutions that are feasible and meet needs of reliability; economy, efficiency, and finish, when it comes to materials that define your floor, walls, roofs, windows, and doors. There are ways of defining best practices that offer you effective solutions for reuse of water in a way that you slash dependence on fresh water by a staggering 70%. Energy demand for air-conditioning is not going to go away. Your need for comfort and convenience is not going to be defined any less sparsely than we have in the last 40 years of global prosperity. But there are ways you can counter these with a strong focus on the supply side of need and not on the demand side as our engineers have so far over centuries, and particularly in the last century when the most amount of buildings actually came into being in all Time.
