What are Green Building Materials? What is the Environmental Protection Building Materials?

The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Taiwan's construction industry accounts for about 28% of the country's total emissions, and each person lives indoors for about 90% of his life. Therefore, how to improve the environmental and health benefits of building materials and promote traditional building materials? Industrial upgrading to improve the living and health of Chinese people is an urgent issue for the government at present! Green building materials include recycled plastic and rubber products, thermal insulation materials for construction, water-based coatings, recycled wood products, resource-based brick building materials, and resource recovery and reuse building materials.

What are Green Building Materials?

The concept of green materials is defined as materials that have the least load on the earth's environment and are harmless to human health in the process of raw material collection, product manufacturing, application process and after use, are called green building materials. Green building materials can be divided into ecological, healthy, high-performance, and recycled green building materials.

Features of green building materials:
Reuse, Recycle, Reduce, and Low-emission materials.

The advantages of green building materials:

• Ecological materials: Reduce the ecological load and energy consumption of chemical synthetic materials.
• Health and safety: The use of natural materials and low-volatile organic matter building materials can avoid the hazards of chemical synthetic materials.
• Recyclability: Reduce material production energy consumption and resource consumption.

The meaning and purpose of the general regulation of green building materials:

• Green building materials are environmentally friendly: It should be ensured that the green building materials label products will not cause environmental impact in all stages of the life cycle.
• Specifications and standards of green building materials: The quality should comply with regulations and general functional requirements.
• Green building materials are non-toxic building materials to ensure that they will not cause health hazards to the human body.

What is the Green Building Indicator?

Green buildings used to refer to buildings that consume the least amount of earth's resources and produce the least waste, but are now expanded to ecological, energy-saving, waste-reduction, and healthy buildings.

• Biodiversity indicators: Increase biological habitat and diversify species.
• Greening quantity index: Convert the carbon dioxide emitted by the building into the absorption number of plants to reduce the carbon dioxide concentration.
• Base water conservation index: Enable the land to conserve water sources and reduce urban floods and famines.
• Daily energy-saving indicators: Save energy for daily use.
• Carbon dioxide reduction index: Use low carbon dioxide emission building materials.
• Waste reduction indicators: Use automation and standardization to avoid waste.
• Indoor health indicators: Avoid sound, light, heat, air, electromagnetic and other factors that affect indoor health.
• Water resources indicators: Save water.
• Sewage and garbage reduction indicators: Reduce the daily use of sewage and garbage.

What are the Classifications of Green Building Materials?

1. Ecological (environmentally friendly) building materials: In the whole life cycle of building materials from the production system, in addition to meeting the basic performance requirements, it is the most natural building material for the global environment, consuming the least energy and processing the least resources.
   • Natural building materials without the crisis of scarcity: Such as rattan, bamboo, grass, wool, clay, and other natural woods that are inexhaustible, or wood for sustainable forestry management. Most of the wood for sustainable forestry management comes from cold temperate forests in northern Europe and the United States, and the certificate of origin of the sustainable forest can be used as the basis for the identification of green building materials. Most of the wood commonly used in Taiwan comes from unsustainable tropical forests. This move not only swallows the tropical rainforest but also accelerates the extinction of tropical creatures. It is not a green building material to encourage the use of.
   • Ecological pest control and preservative: General plant extracts have the problems of high volatility and short persistence, but insect repellants and preservatives made from natural plants can overcome this problem, and the toxicity test and safety of their oil preparations are acceptable to the public authority’s thing.
   • Natural ecological building materials: Natural ecological building materials can replace non-decorative surface building materials such as toxic chemically synthesized caulks, wood surface coatings, and thermal insulation materials. It is not only environmentally friendly but also maintains the quality of healthy life at home. For example, the use of non-foamed caulks and natural thermal insulation materials can reduce the damage of chlorofluorocarbons to the ozone layer, which is of great help to global environmental protection.
2. Healthy building materials: Building materials with low emission, low pollution, low odor, and low physiological hazard characteristics, mainly aiming at low emission of formaldehyde and low volatile organic compounds, such as low VOC plywood, low chemical gas emission Sexual building materials, water-based environmentally friendly paints, natural ecological paints, and other building materials.
   • Ecological coating: Ecological coatings such as water-based environmentally friendly paints, natural ecological paints, and other building materials. If you can try to reduce the pollution of paint, it is most beneficial to the indoor environment. Healthy and natural paint emphasize the use of harmless and non-toxic pigments, such as persimmon, linseed oil, resin, and other plant ingredients, plant pigments, honey, beeswax, essential oils, soybeans, etc. After painting, it can protect the strengthening, moisturizing, and breathing of wood. Prevent static electricity, good waterproof, is antibacterial, has strong weather resistance, simple construction, and can be used for indoor and outdoor, furniture.
   • Ecological adhesive: The environmentally friendly adhesive has the function of humidity control, prevents indoor condensation, good hydrophilicity, anti-pollution, and static electricity prevention, inhibits pathogenic bacteria, decomposes odor, promotes air circulation, and saves energy. It can be used for inner and outer walls, patios, roofs, etc., to prevent surface acid rain and air pollution.
3. High-performance building materials: Refers to building materials with high performance, which can overcome the performance defects of traditional building materials to improve quality and efficiency. Common problems in life such as noise control and poor water retention capacity of the base can be improved to a considerable extent by using building materials with better performance.
   • High-performance soundproof green building materials: Building materials that can effectively prevent noise from affecting the quality of life.
   • High-performance permeable green building materials: Products with good water permeability to surface runoff, which meet the requirements of base water retention indicators.
4. Renewable building materials: Refers to building materials with low processing degree, low energy consumption, low CO2 emission, low pollution emission, easy to decompose naturally, reusable, conforming to the local industrial ecology, and no scarcity crisis.
   • Regeneration and recycling of building materials: Refers to recyclable building materials such as old wood, old tires, old furniture, old equipment, recycling, and reuse, and can be further subdivided into the following categories:
     • Recycled wood building materials: The interior decoration of buildings, floors, ceilings, skirting boards, partition boards, doors, and various wooden furniture, etc.
     • Stone recycled building materials: Stone building materials are produced by using waste concrete materials or inorganic stone materials that are harmless in the process.
     • Mixed material recycled building materials: Wood or stone building materials are mixed with various industrial non-hazardous wastes such as waste glass, etc., to promote the function of building materials. Such as imitation wood, lightweight aggregates, permeable bricks, etc.
   • Local building materials: The production of building materials is an industrial product with high energy consumption density. From the perspective of the life cycle of building materials, their production, transportation, secondary processing, and even disposal consume a lot of energy. CO2, so the use of building materials not only consumes energy and electricity but also increases the load on the global environment. Therefore, building materials with fewer processing times are better for environmental protection, low energy consumption, high recyclability, repeatable assembly, and good durability, to reduce the overall environmental load.

What is the Green Building Appeal?

1. Ecological green building materials, green building materials in line with sustainable earth:
   Ecological building materials, in the process of production to destruction, low-processing, low-energy consumption, and other low-manual processing materials, such as hemp, cotton, silk, bamboo, rattan, and other natural building materials are less vulnerable to scarcity. Or wood that is labeled as sustainable forestry management is in this category. In addition, insect repellents, preservatives made of natural plants, or caulks made of natural ecological building materials, wood surface coatings, thermal insulation materials, etc., can reduce the damage of chlorofluorocarbons to the ozone layer, which is also harmful to the environment. A kind of ecological building material that is friendly and sustainable for the earth.
2. Healthy green building materials, the main appeal is to improve indoor air quality:
   Building materials with low toxicity and low health risks belong to the category of healthy green building materials, mainly building materials with low formaldehyde and low volatile organic compound emission that will affect the quality of the indoor air environment. Agents such as water-based environmentally friendly paint, natural ecological paint, etc. are included, and the emission rate of formaldehyde and total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) is used as the evaluation index. If the building materials that do not release formaldehyde such as metal, glass, pure concrete, and other building materials are not included in the assessment.
3. High-performance green building materials to overcome the performance shortcomings of traditional building materials:
   Refers to building materials and material components with high performance, which can overcome the performance defects of traditional building materials to improve quality and efficiency. At present, the evaluation items of the high-performance green building materials label include soundproofing, water permeability, and energy saving. High-performance soundproof green building materials and building materials components that can effectively prevent noise from affecting the quality of life. High-performance permeable green building materials refer to building materials with high porosity, good water permeability, good water permeability to surface runoff, and meeting the requirements of base water retention. High-performance energy-saving green building materials refer to building materials that can effectively prevent outdoor heat energy from entering the building, achieve the purpose of saving energy, and improve the quality of life.
4. Recycled green building materials, recycled building materials:
   The building materials manufactured by using recycled materials, through the remanufacturing process, and complying with the principles of waste reduction, reuse, and recycling are recycled green building materials, such as the recycling of old wood, old tires, old furniture, old equipment, etc. Recycled building materials can be subdivided into wooden recycled green building materials for interior floors, ceilings, doors, and various wooden furniture. Stone-recycled green building materials such as building exterior walls, partition walls, and floor tiles. In addition, concrete masonry blocks, waste glass, ceramic waste, etc. can be properly sieved into recycled aggregates for construction, and in wood/stone building materials, various industrial non-hazardous wastes such as waste glass are added to promote the function of building materials, such as imitation wood, lightweight aggregates, permeable bricks, and other mixed-material recycled building materials.