Katja Castellanos

Homeexam 28-11-13
Environmental Aspects of the Built Environment
1.
a) 1. The closeness to water makes it a sensitive site when constructing
and afterwards at the operational stage when discharging waste or leading
off stormwater. Attention has to be paid so that the waterlife does not get
affected. This is an environmental consideration.
2. The proximity to the road means that there is a social aspect to consider
(health), in terms of accessibility to and from the site and safety crossing
roads, and as in air quality and noise within the area.
3. Since the new site would be cutting off the Urban National Park from
Krftriket and the water front, there should be a regard to keeping a
green corridor to facilitate a pass for flora and fauna.
b) As Dammann (2004) discusses in his thesis, the indoor climate is
regarded as an environmental issue due to our activities indoor. We have
made it an environmental aspect since our health is affected by it.
Therefore, two of the three environmental targets mentioned below have
to do with indoor climate.
1. In order to have as little an impact on the surrounding area with
reference to the proximity to water, the target should be that the material
used for the buildings, especially materials for roof and faades, should be
chosen with regard to corrosion risk and risk that stormwater will transport
hazardous chemicals to the sea, e.g. no impregnated wood or hazardous
metals. The indicator for this should be the values measured in the water
for chemical composition.
2. The target for a high indoor air quality is that there is no impact on
health due to traffic emissions or building material. Indicator for this will be
a well-functioning ventilation system, preferably installation of ventilation
with sensors (without mercury) that function on the basis on need/certain
concentration of toxicity in the air (Miljbyggnad NC 2012).
3. The target is that the users will not be disturbed by any noise from the
near-by traffic (road and tram) (ibid), and the indicator would be a survey
response showing that at least 80 % of the users are satisfied or better
with the acoustics and noise level in the building.

2.
a) To densify in an urban area does not have to mean taking away all the
green spaces. But it would still have an impact on life within the city.
1. There are some indoor climate factors important to us that have to do
with the design of the urban area (Bokalders et al 2010). Sunlight is very
important, especially in a Swedish context. Increasing the density of
buildings would mean to hinder sunlight from reaching ground-level floors.
And if buildings are constructed close together and quite high, there will
be a lot of floors not having direct daylight coming in. This affects health
and everyday well-being. Increasing more densely would also mean
increasing the noise level. Of course, new buildings could be appropriately
insulated, but this would be costly to do in already existing buildings.
2. The second disadvantage from building more densely, and maybe even
taking green spaces away, would be a higher concentration of chemicals
embedded in the constructions. Also, since constructions have a long
lifespan, the materials embedded in them, over which we sometimes have
little knowledge of how toxic they are, can affect us for a long time. And
since there would be no or little vegetation to mitigate this impact it would
create an unhealthy outdoor environment with bad air quality and even
heightened temperatures (Meeting 4). Of course, this would alter overall
ecology within the city (Pauleit and Breuste 2011).
b) Humans sometimes see themselves as outside of nature, and identify
nature as something less valuable than urban structures. This has caused
many environmental problems since we do not consider our impact. In the
past 40 years this mistake has become clear, since our impact on nature
has had a negative effect for us as well.
We are part of nature in that we need what nature produces for us, i.e.
ecosystem services and therefore it would be to our disadvantage if we
exclude green areas. Ecosystems are the basis of our life. Vegetation
produces air and food, without which we wouldnt survive. In an urban
setting we might not be aware of the food production, but we are quite
aware of air quality.
Urban life is often stressful and hectic. It has been medically shown how
much healthier we become just by spending some time in a natural setting
like a park or a small forest. If we would take away green areas completely

from our cities, there is a great risk that we would become sicker and that
our well-being would decrease.
So, out of respect for nature and what it does for us, we should allow green
spaces in the cities. If we humans have appropriated us of land, and have
had a negative impact on ecosystems and habitats already, we should at
least let nature reside in the cities as well.

3.
a) Kibert mentions at least three flows of importance for a sustainable
construction: Energy, water and building material.
b) Energy affects the environment at the production stage. Of course it
depends if energy comes from e.g. hydrological plants or from coal
incineration, then the impact of the emissions that energy causes will be
quite different. In any case the target is to keep the use of energy as low
as possible and to use energy that comes from renewable sources.
Water is crucial for drinking and our life-style of high hygiene standards.
Unfortunately we are using it quite inefficiently, extracting clean water
and polluting it in our buildings. In this way the impact on the environment
is two-fold, there are areas which lack water because of our extraction
(although to a larger extent for agricultural purposes) and areas where the
water has been contaminated to the point of killing life where the water is
let out.
Material going into construction often has a certain amount of
hazardousness. This can have an impact already at the construction stage
if the material is left unsupervised. It can have an impact on indoor
environment by polluting the air making it unhealthy to be in the building,
or for the outdoor environment through leakages into air, soil and water.
And after use, if the material is not taken care of, like a reusable resource,
the material can be polluting the environment at the waste stage when it
decomposes into soil, water and air.
c) In order to be more efficient with energy, a technical solution is to build
e.g. passive houses which shouldnt need a lot of energy to operate. And
by installing digital devices inside homes that show how much energy is
being consumed, it has been seen that the behavior of the consumers has
changed in a positive direction.
In order to consume water more efficiently the water-closets should be
exchanged for separating closets, where you dont need as much water to
flush, and you dont need clean water to flush but it could do with

rainwater. We must also change our behavior and be careful not to pollute
the water system with detergents, oils and other things.
A technical improvement on the issue of material building could be to have
a greater control over materials used, and also make urban mining a rule.
Behavioral improvement is the responsibility of any builder, be it private or
corporate. It should only be possible to use material that is reusable, nonhazardous and hopefully renewable.

4.
a) I would use a cost-benefit analysis to get monetary values on how the
energy-efficient windows will be more cost-efficient in the long-run
compared to the conventional windows. Since the LCC has a similar
approach it could be an alternative. The CBA/LCC would also show the
benefits of the environmental aspects compared to the cheaper windows,
which together with the better long-term price hopefully would attract
more buyers.
b) I need an analytical accounting tool in order to find out how the
composition of the water is now. Since my object is a product (clean water)
or the service of water treatment I would consider the MIPS (material input
per unit service). I do not choose SFA or any other flow analysis tool since I
am not interested in how the different substances will change in the
process of the treatment, I only need to know what comes into the water
treatment plant.
c) In order to show the impact that an accident in the plant would have,
and since the project hasnt started yet there are no data over emissions
or such, I would be doing an SEA instead of an EIA (Finnveden och Moberg
2005) which is a very similar tool, procedural and change-oriented, but it
is used earlier in the project process when there is not so much data
available. In some cases economic aspects have been integrated in the
assessment (ibid.) and this I would try to implement since it would be
important to acknowledge the potential damage of an accident in
monetary terms. Normally the public is invited to take part of such an
assessment, which might be a difficult thing considering the topic. In this
respect it might rather be good to use the EU-developed SIA which
considers economical, environmental and social aspects of the potential
impact (Ness et al 2007). On the other hand the SIA might require data
which is not available. As part of the SEA/SIA I would then proceed making
a risk assessment of accidents combined with an uncertainty analysis
having thereby an evaluation on how probable it is that an accident would

occur; followed by an assessment of the possible consequences of such an

accident.

5.
A LCA traces the environmental impact of a process that leads up to a
product, both on the input- and the output side. This means that the
building could have a good rating environmentally, meaning that the
source of building material is sustainable, the process of building has been
energy-efficient and so forth, but still have a design that is not optimal for
its users.
The indoor air quality might be affected of an architectural design that
does not allow for draught. The building would then need a good
ventilation system but if this is lacking as well, people can feel that the air
is stuffy, and that it is hard to get in fresh air just by opening the windows.
The building is maybe built on a more exposed place, maybe looking out
on a stream in central Stockholm. In the summer the sunlight comes in
with full strength through the beautiful big windows, but there is no
efficient technical way to get shade. So it will get very hot in the
summertime, especially for those working close to the windows. In
wintertime there is not sufficient heating underneath the windows (since
they take up all the space) so the air indoors gets cooled down quickly and
streams unto the ground (kallras).
Since many choices of insulation contain hazardous material, the builders
have chosen not to insulate more than necessary. Instead they have
placed the offices close to the big windows facing the water, and no offices
facing the streets, foreseeing disturbance of noise from the street. They
have not considered though, that the noise inside the building also is
disturbing (Dammann 2004), like steps from colleagues, noise from
equipment, elevator and such.
The light conditions are very much affected by the size of the windows.
But the choice of the colors on the walls also influences the glairiness that
is perceived by the workers. It feels like having sunlight all around and
squinting all day gives headaches.

6.
1. One explanation lies on the side of the operational stage. Buildings have
become more energy-efficient when we consider housing that makes use

of passive heating/cooling/air flow and such. In these houses the need for
energy is lower than in modern houses (Bokalders and Block 2010).
2. The second explanation, which even might be the backside of the first
one, is that builders (the construction stage) seek to use materials that
have characteristics which makes the building energy-efficient. It might be
windows with a shading layer, which is more energy costly to manufacture
than conventional windows. And since some materials are nowadays
classified as toxic, builders need to replace them with others, and
searching for suitable ones might also be a costly process. The last point
to make on the construction stage is that constructing itself requires
energy. This will probably always be so, whilst the product can be made
more and more efficient.

7.
a) Production based allocation approach means that one measures the
CO2 resulting from production. In Stockholm there is no major production
industry so there shouldnt be a great environmental impact from
Stockholm if using this approach. And since there is a higher concentration
of people per m2 this should also contribute to a low result on impact per
capita. In other places where the production effect is distributed on a lower
amount of people, it would seem that that area has a very high CO2
footprint compared to Stockholm.
b)
1. The consumption approach shows more clearly the impact of choices we
make when buying exotic food or shrimps that have travelled across the
world twice before getting to the store, or when we use the car to make
the weekly shopping, and so on. Therefore it is more useful when trying to
change peoples behavior by influencing awareness. The consumption
approach gives you a more realistic view on our life-style, and hopefully,
when we realize the impact that we are causing we will change our
consumption behavior, and it will have a positive effect on global
sustainability.
2. My second argument is closely linked to the above statement. If
municipalities or even governments cant hide behind nice-looking
statistics (production approach) then hopefully the pressure from public
opinion, and hence on them as politicians, will result in political consensus
that there needs to be implemented stricter policies on citizens,
enterprises, transport, trade, the building sector, in other words, stricter

policies in planning. This will definitely have an impact of global

magnitude, which is necessary to reach global sustainability.