【Het Leven in Nederland 10】Materials and Ecological Engineering
Written on May 24, 2019
The specialization which I am now studying in TU Delft is called “Materials for Sustainable Development”, and one of the elective courses in this specialization is “Materials and Ecological Engineering”. The course was held in the department of civil engineering, and the two main themes in this course are conducting life-cycle assessments (LCA) for different construction cases and identifying urban applications of ecological engineering.
During the lecture, Professor Henk Jonkers, the inventor of self-healing bio-concrete, taught us the basic concepts of LCA methodology according to Dutch Bouwbesluit 2012. It is regulated that for all houses and office buildings in the Netherlands, which are built after 2013 with a total user surface larger than 100 square meters, the environmental impact calculation must be delivered. This assessment contains the calculations of 11 environmental impact categories in different construction and transportation stages, including global warming, freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity, eutrophication, and abiotic fuel depletion, etc. By conducting LCA properly, one can assess the sustainability of a construction case and make further optimization according to the result.
Aside from LCA, we also studied the use of sustainable materials and energy, green building envelops, multiples functions that an ecosystem can provide, and the interaction between the environment and building materials. The topic which has the biggest scale is “infrastructure and landscape ecology”. In this topic, several ecological engineering solutions to habitat fragmentation and road disturbance were discussed, including fish ladders, eco-ducts, and roadside verges.
The most interesting topic I found in this course was the overview of natural building, including its properties, construction methods, potential, and limitation. One of Professor Jonkers’ students, Yask Kulshreshtha, was invited to share his Ph.D. research on natural building materials with us (specifically, mud and other biomaterials). After Yask backpacked around his home country, India, for nine months and lived in different earth houses, he realized that due to its low social image in the modern society, the people in the remote areas may not want to build a natural building even though it is cheap and sustainable. To regain the popularity of natural buildings and raise its social image, Yask wants to improve the durability of mud building blocks and the design of natural buildings through the help of materials science.
Recommended videoes
(1) TU Delft — Building affordable homes using local biological resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPi3oxvdB9I
(2) TED: Guerilla gardening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w
