ABSTRACT
The construction and operation of the built environment has disproportionate impacts on the natural environment relative to its role in the economy. Although it represents about 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the USA, the construction sector consumes 40% of all extracted materials, produces one-third of the total landfill waste stream, and accounts for 30% of national energy consumption for its operation. The sustainability of this industrial sector is dependent on a fundamental shift in the way in which resources are used, from non-renewables to renewables, from high levels of waste to high levels of reuse and recycling, and from products based on lowest first cost to those based on life cycle costs and full cost accounting, especially as applied to waste and emissions from the industrial processes that support construction activity. Construction, like other industries, would benefit from observing the metabolic behavior of natural systems, in which sustainability is a property of a complex web of niche elements. The emerging field of industrial ecology, which is examining Nature for its lessons for industry, provides some insights into sustainability in the built environment or sustainable construction. This book proposes and outlines the concept of construction ecology, a view of construction industry based on natural ecology and industrial ecology for the purpose of shifting construction industry and the materials and manufacturing industries supporting it onto a path much closer to the ideals of sustainability. Additionally, construction ecology would embrace a wide range of symbiotic, synergistic, built environment-natural environment relationships to include large-scale, bioregional, “green infrastructure” in which natural systems provide energy and materials flows for cities and towns and the human occupants provide nutrients for the supporting ecological systems.
