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Sustainable Materials - Without the Hot Air: Making Buildings, Vehicles and Products Efficiently and with Less New Material |  |
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Sustainable Materials - Without the Hot Air: Making Buildings, Vehicles and Products Efficiently and with Less New Material | |
"An excellent book ... the message is clear and convincing: We can't go on using materials the way we have been for the past 150 years, but fortunately, we don't have to. We can meet the world's growing need for the stuff of modern life, avoid the worst effects of climate change, and preserve the environment for future generations." [Review of 1st Edition] -- Bill Gates, Gates Notes
作者简介Julian Allwood is a Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the Low Carbon Materials Processing research group. Jonathan Cullen is University Lecturer in the University of Cambridge Engineering Department. They both have extensive practical experience working in the engineering industry, as well as taking part in numerous research projects.
网友对Sustainable Materials - Without the Hot Air: Making Buildings, Vehicles and Products Efficiently and with Less New Material的评论
The contents merit at least four stars - maybe five. But unfortunately the Kindle formatting is very poor. The paper (and PDF) versions contain brilliantly coloured diagrams and schematics, but on the kindle the graphs are too small as well as being almost entirely indecipherable, thanks to all the colours being rendered into similar shades of grey. The footnotes are also messed up in the kindle presentations.
Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen are both engineering academics at Cambridge University. Their latest book, "Sustainable Materials - without the Hot Air", written in conjunction with six other members of their research team (whose names didn't make it onto the outer cover for reasons of ink-saving, no doubt) is a revised and expanded version of their earlier (2011) book, "Sustainable Materials - with Both Eyes Open". Although underpinned by extensive and rigorous academic research conducted in association with a wide range of industrial partners from all sectors of manufacturing, the book is far from stuffy or indigestible in its approach. It is chock full of pretty pictures, colourful diagrams, amusing analogies and irritating puns that will either help you through the more complicated sections, or else send you up the wall for its seeming lightness. The substantive subject matter of the book is very far from light, however. (Incidentally, the book is also chock full of proof-reading errors and typographical mishaps, which is a great shame, because some of these render important sections hard to follow. Hopefully subsequent printings of the book will have these ironed out. No pun intended. Oh, all right, it was.)
In this book, the authors present a systematic and comprehensive review of the materials that mankind use with a view to answering the basic question of whether or not the world stands any chance of making the large scale reductions to climate changing emissions to which most nations are now committed. In essence, the books asks whether it is possible for us to create a sustainable future for material usage, not just from an availability point of view but also from an environmental one and if so, where our best chances for doing this might lie. They present this as a global issue, requiring global solutions, not just piecemeal, isolationist solutions, which are more likely just to move the problem around rather than to solve it. (As the authors are at pains to point out, it is meaningless for the aluminium industry, for instance, to claim that electrical power emissions are somehow separate from their own industrial emissions when 76% of the energy required to mine, process, refine, form and recycle aluminium goods is required by the aluminium industry in the form of electricity. Similarly, it is pointless a country reducing its emissions simply by shifting dirty operations abroad -- this does not help the global situation one little bit.)
The authors identify five materials as being the current main contributors to present day emissions in terms of their extraction, processing, utilisation and disposal -- aluminium, steel, concrete, plastic and paper. Thereafter, they concentrate attention on these as the areas in which the greatest reductions must be made, focusing in the first instance on practices within the steel and aluminium industries, as by far the best quantified and most monitored at present (and therefore with good reliable data readily available). The other three materials are each revisited towards the end of the book to see how far the possibilities identified for the metal industries could be applied to them.
The approach taken is to examine the full range of options along the entire production chain and life cycle of the items made from the materials under consideration. This basically means an exploration of
- the emissions savings to be had from improved extraction, processing, refining and recycling technologies;
- opportunities for creating less wasted material during manufacture of finished goods (90% of the aluminium purchased by the aircraft manufacturing industry, for example, never makes it into a finished aircraft but ends up as machined swarf in skips along the way);
- opportunities for making things from less material (most buildings have far more steel in them than they need owing to designers' tendency to over-specify building strengths; over-ordering of materials is routine on many construction projects simply because time delays arising from shortages are more costly than the waste from over-ordering etc)
- ways of extending lifetimes of goods in order to reduce demand for replacements (this not only reduces demand for new material, it saves on emissions associated with recovering and recycling materials from the old items)
- ways of reusing materials from discarded items, rather than recycling them (if old buildings were dismantled with care rather than demolished with a wrecking ball, for example, much of the steel work and even the bricks would remain perfectly serviceable for use in replacement buildings)
and (shock! horror!)
- opportunities for actually making do with less!
By assessing all of these options and quantifying the potential gains to be made in each case, the authors systematically identify the best areas for attention by manufacturers, politicians and consumers alike.
When the first edition of the book was published, in 2011, the authors were optimistic that the target of 50% reduction in emissions by 2050 was perfectly achievable if concerted efforts were made in appropriate quarters to adopt new methods of working or adapt current practices, bolstered by appropriate legislation and accompanied by programmes of awareness-raising and engagement of the public. In this new edition, they note that three and half years years down the line, however, almost no steps have been taken by anyone towards the goal to which governments are supposedly committed. Since this new edition was penned in early 2015, moreover, things have actually become worse in the UK, with the current government's wholesale abandoning of its former green energy objectives and an increasing tendency for us to buy dirtier goods from abroad because of the way the emissions beans are currently counted (we're somehow seen as cleaner by buying high emissions products from overseas than by making medium emissions products ourselves, because we only count the emissions that occur on our own soil, not those that we cause to occur in other lands!)
It is perhaps ironic that the exemplar product spotlighted in the book for longevity and therefore minimising demand for replacements to existing stock, the Landrover Defender -- where 85% of the number ever made are still in use, many with their original owners -- has just this very month gone out of production forever because the manufacturers are unable to refine the model sufficiently to meet the new tailpipe emissions standards for cars.
Oh well, I suppose that will provide the authors with another anecdote to include in the next edition.
Folks, the problem will be, if we are honest, that our contractors in most areas of the country, do not have this book, but should.
How can we get this information out there? A woman I know is her own General Contractor, and had to order most of the supplies because her contractors down here in the Lower Rio Grande Valley do not KNOW HOW even to ORDER this sort of product. She did, and only therefore got them. But even the Building Inspectors don't know how to approve them. How sad that we are so slow to do what is needed.
Very informative. Very dense material. I am satisfied
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