Thursday, July 17, 2014

Construction and global warming

Construction is one of the industries that contribute to global warming. Why is so? . Let we take a look into what is global warming.

Global warming in actual fact is due to green house effect. Green house effect happened because there increased in greenhouse gases(GHG) concentration in our atmosphere. Some of the green house gases are Carbon dioxide (CO2), Nitrous oxide or Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), Ozone(O3), Methane(CH4) and other harmful gases which have a capability to trap heat from being radiated out from our atmosphere. Some of this green house gases have the ability to exist in our atmosphere more that 100 years.

So how does our construction industries become one of the contributor to this global issue? Before we answer this question, it is best to know activities that produce these greenhouse gases(GHG). CO2 usually being produce as one of the end product from the burning of fossil fuel, where as CFC or to be more accurate Tetrachloroethene is widely used as dry cleaning agent. May be some of the cleaning agent that we used contained CFC and we applied it in our construction method.

Another cause for the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere is deforestation. As we know,  plant need CO2 to enable them to generate their food. Hence by reducing the number of plants through deforestation activities will reduce the process of carbon sink. Construction industries especially the development of area for habitation involved land clearing(Deforestation) in a big scale.

Know, how do we relate this global warming issue with our construction industries? First what are some of the activities that contribute to the GHG? As mention earlier, Burning of fossil fuels and deforestation playing a significant role in increasing the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. Years ago,  before laws and regulation was implemented due to the alarming issue of this global warming, Construction industries tend to cleared their debris by method of open burning. It might be the cheapest solution to cleared up all the debris compare to utilised the service from any waste treatment agency which having expertise in dealing with the controlled burning technology. However method of uncontrolled open burning can cause even more CO2 being released into our atmosphere. Therefore in construction industries this method must not being used as a way of debris disposal. Further to this, the other impact to the owner of the construction project is being at risk of being penalised for the breach of laws and regulation.


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