Читать книгу The Construction Technology Handbook - Hugh Seaton - Страница 23

In the United States, 40% of greenhouse gases come from the built environment. Globally the number is similar, at 39%.

The construction industry is projected to create 2.2 billion tons of waste by the year 2025. That is a massive number, and it cannot be sustained forever. In recent years, for example, many developing nations have stopped accepting US and European solid waste, forcing hard choices about where to put it. The great Pacific garbage patch, a floating collection of small and large plastic roughly 1.6 million square kilometers in size, is evidence that concern about where we put our trash has gone from an environmentalists' abstract warning to a concrete, practical reality that threatens our food supply, as well as our actual health.

Whether it's from governments, concerned groups, or investors, the pressure to reduce solid waste from construction is only going to grow in the coming years.

Climate change is not just a negative driver, though. While construction does contribute to climate change, it is also our first line of defense against many of the dangers climate change will pose. As low lying areas in Italy, the Netherlands, and in the USA, including most of southern Florida and the gulf states of Alabama, Mississippi, and especially Louisiana face the prospect of rising seas, it will be up to construction to build the walls, levees, and drainage that will save our communities from the storm surges that increasingly threaten them. It is easy to look at projections of whole areas of the country underwater in 50–100 years and be dismissive of these projections as uncertain. But we cannot overlook the fact that it isn't required that the land to be underwater for there to be a threat – hurricanes like Katrina and Sandy showed how much damage a two‐day storm can wreak with oceans right where they are now.