Assessing Material Efficiency and Impacts in Buildings (AMEIB)

The construction industry remains locked onto an unsustainable trajectory of runaway environmental impacts unless it rapidly transforms the materials it produces and uses. Cement production may alone comprise a third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions by 2050, up from ~8% today. Construction materials (cement, concrete, bricks, steel, etc.) are mainly used in buildings.

This project - Assessing Materials Efficiency and Impacts in Buildings (AMEIB) - addresses this challenge to sustainably transform materials use in the built environment, focusing on buildings and all major construction materials. AMEIB will develop a novel multiscale material flow impact analysis (MFIA) algorithm that directly and quantitatively integrates resource availability, industrial ecology, and materials science. Applications of the MFIA algorithm will identify scenarios and materials that approach maximal efficiency and minimal life cycle environment impacts (e.g., CO2 emissions) in buildings, across the UK. These results will benchmark the extent to which impacts related to buildings can be reduced through materials efficiency measures, providing guidance to policymakers, low impact technologies for industry, and research targets for materials scientists.

The novel systems and materials uncovered by AMEIB will pioneer the 'materials efficient city'. AMEIB lays the foundation for follow-up work to apply this MFIA approach globally and also across all industrial sectors. Therefore, AMEIB provides a significant step towards holistic analysis and implementation of materials efficiency in the built environment, rational management of industry-wide resource use and impacts, and also 'sustainable urban development'.

AMEIB addresses the growing need to rapidly reduce whole life cycle environmental impacts (hereafter 'impacts') associated with use of construction materials in the built environment, to achieve climate change goals such as the Paris Agreement.

Its key research outputs are: (1) a georeferenced database of UK construction material stocks; (2) an MFIA algorithm; (3) scenarios to achieve materials efficient built environments and their policy implications; and (4) the identification, synthesis, and characterisation of novel, available, and low impact construction materials.

Research outputs will be converted into tangible economic and social impacts through effective dissemination to designers of built environments, home builders, producers of secondary materials, researchers/managers of resources, policymakers, students, and clients/the public.

The four key research outputs from AMEIB aim to achieve economic and social impacts in the following ways:

(1) Its georeferenced database will be developed using a data structure that will enable improved quantification of construction material stocks; therefore, this methodology may be used by mineral/resource surveying institutions to enhance their data and add value to their data gathering/reporting practices. It will be open access and provide a highly useful basis to built environment/industrial ecology research, providing further benefit.

(2) The MFIA algorithm will integrate life cycle assessment (LCA), material flow analysis (MFA), and spatial data analysis to directly link specific materials and whole systems. It will enable the innovative transdisciplinary industrial ecology/materials science research approach applied in AMEIB. This algorithm will provide the basis for dissemination of research outputs to clients through a content-rich interactive website, which will add value to lower impact building materials and possibly their increased use by home builders.

(3) Scenarios will establish the extent to which maximising material efficiency can reduce impacts such as CO2 emissions in the built environment, providing a baseline understanding of the extent to which perspectives like the circular economy can reduce impacts in this sector. Significantly, these scenarios will be used to develop guidance for policymakers and designers of built environments to realise impact reductions, and thus pioneer the concept of the 'materials efficient city'. Additional impacts may include better spending of UK Govt. money and improved design practices.

(4) Materials developed in AMEIB will add value to underutilised materials with lower impacts, which will drive growth, lead to economic impacts for their producers, and enable a transformation in the sustainability of the built environment. Therefore, AMEIB will identify materials that will be prime targets for follow-up materials science/circular economy research, to the benefit of those research communities and society.

Therefore, AMEIB addresses multiple pillars in the UK Govt.'s Industrial Strategy, including improved procurement of buildings (pillar 5), delivery of clean growth via increased demand for low(er) impact construction materials (pillar 7), and increased growth driven by adding value to underutilised materials (pillar 9). These impacts also contribute to the EPSRC Prosperity Outcomes of Productive Nation and Resilient Nation.