Week5 post-session review: Beyond Carbon Neutrality: Strategies for Reductive and Restorative Sustainability

This article focuses on reductive and restorative sustainability to provide solutions to minimize harmful influences on the environment through building processes.

I am interested in reductive sustainability part of this article because this part is mainly about materials and my another course is about materials as well. As it is said in this article, materials in the building play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. It is necessary for designers to have carefully consideration to choose materials because good materials can help to reduce energy consumption, for example, in order to improve energy efficiency, maximizing thermal mass is vital, in winter, materials with high thermal mass value can absorb and store heat from the sun so that they can reduce the use of air conditioning and heater, which can save energy. Therefore, rating tools have established systems to verify whether materials in the building is sustainable. In addition, a company called the footprint company has already created a system to investigate the embodied carbon emission of materials.