Creating and Building Sustainable Homes for Environmental Sustainability

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINAILITY: CREATING AND
BUILDING SUSTAINABLE HOMES
DATED:
SUBMISSION:

1. INTRODUCTION
The government of Australia has set ambitious targets of transforming the renewable energy
markets and boosting the country’s power efficiency while substantially lowering the amount of
carbon emissions. This is in line with the global targets of carbon emissions following the
international ratification of the climate change pact in Paris 2016 (Energy.gov, 2018). The fossil
fuels have greatly contributed to the global menace of climate change as levels of carbon
emissions due to these archaic sources have resulted into the damaging of the ozone layer.
Consequently, it has led to unpredictable climatic patterns and further deterioration of the
existing natural forms of life. However, there is need to conduct a thorough evaluation of the
existing energy consumptions and use this data to design an ideal home that guarantees zero
carbon emissions (European Commission, 2018). However, on a larger scale, it would actually
require great innovation from the stakeholders so as to improve the energy use efficiency and
carbon emissions reduction targets in Australia. The report hereinafter entails the evaluation of
the current consumption and carbon emissions performance in selected residential home. There
are two home models created, that is: YH and RH where YH is the acceptable ideal home where
carbon emissions are zero while RH is the existing home where performance of carbon emission
is to be evaluated. Notably, this will require strategies that are sustainable in order to create ideal
YH. The aim is to design and create a workable model for a zero carbon emission home by
utilizing the sustainable construction practices.

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Consumption (Mwe)
Year on change
Figure 1: Energy consumption for the Victoria state for a 10 year period.
2. REVIEWING THE LOW/ZERO CARBON DESIGN TECHNOLOGY
2.1 Selection of low carbon construction materials
In this section, we select some of the materials that if used could substantially (in a collective
manner) reduce the amount of carbon being released to the atmosphere. Typically, in the walling
element, the type and mode of thermal insulation and the structural adequacy of the walling
materials elements are some of the requirements necessary hence for instance in our proposed
YH we could use the triple glazing instead of double glazing. However, this would add onto the
construction materials costs. Hence tradeoffs are often necessary when selecting the construction
materials such that an optimum selection is attained between cost and performance.
The concrete material often provides better thermal insulation against the external environment.
Therefore, for the walling elements, concrete and brick wall are selected. The walling system
selected is that of the double brick wall cavity with window glass as the main glazing material.