Energy Efficient Buildings
When measuring sustainability, the energy and resources used to create building materials have to be taken into account. The overall environmental impact of the building sector can therefore be reduced through the use of advanced building materials that take little energy to produce. The LEEMA project has been addressing this issue through the creation of their innovative set of “3i” insulation materials
Low embodied energy insulation materials
Insulation materials form the thermal envelope of a building and reduce heat transfer, thus improving energy efficiency with respect to the heating needs of the building. Much research has been done into improving insulation and reducing the energy footprint of buildings in Europe, but a little known fact is that 20 per cent of the energy a building consumes in its lifetime is in the embodied energy of the building materials i.e. the energy consumed to create those materials. The state of the art insulation materials
used at present — EPS, XPS, glasswool and stonewool — have high-embodied energies mainly due to either the energy intensive conditions needed for their manufacture or
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“About 20 per cent of the energy a building consumes in its lifetime is in the embodied energy of the building materials”
from the high embodied energy of the oil- based raw materials used for their production. These conventional insulating materials can also suffer from various disadvantages including unstable thermal and acoustic performance over time, combustibility, shrinkage, settlement and pollution of the indoor building environment.
LEEMA is a four-year project that has
aimed to develop new, inorganic insulation materials that have 50 per cent lower embodied energy and cost 15 per cent less to produce than conventional insulation materials. This has been achieved using inert, natural alumino-silicate raw materials, originating
from “zero- 31
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