Starting from a previous experience carried out by the working group “Building and Environmental Hygiene” of the Italian Society of Hygiene and Preventive Medicine (SItI), the aim of the present work is to define new strategic goals for achieving a “Healthy and Salutogenic City”, which will be useful to designers, local governments and public bodies, policy makers, and all professionals working at local health agencies. Ten key points have been formulated: 1. climate change and management of adverse weather events; 2. land consumption, sprawl, and shrinking cities; 3. tactical urbanism and urban resilience; 4. urban comfort, safety, and security perception; 5. strengths and weaknesses of urban green areas and infrastructures; 6. urban solid waste management; 7. housing emergencies in relation to socio-economic and environmental changes; 8. energy aspects and environmental planning at an urban scale; 9. socio-assistance and welfare network at an urban scale: importance of a rational and widespread system; and 10. new forms of living, conscious of coparticipation models and aware of sharing quality objectives. Design strategies, actions, and policies, identified to improve public health and wellbeing, underline that the connection between morphological and functional features of urban context and public health is crucial for contemporary cities and modern societies.
The awareness of the heavy impact that the building sector exerts on the natural environment is now widely shared, leading to a wide spread of tools (rules, regulations, voluntary rating) to control and guide towards building environmental sustainability. In this shared vision, the natural environment is perceived essentially as an asset to protect. But nature is not just something to be protected, it is also a key factor to improve the quality of our built environment and our well-being. Numerous studies analyze the positive impact of the introduction of natural elements in building design (i.e. green walls, indoor green, aquatic elements, etc.), including: reduced energy consumption, improved IAQ, benefits on users' attention capacity in office settings, stress-reducing effects in healthcare environments. However, despite this evidence, the use of natural elements in common building practice is still not quite widespread. There is therefore a need to promote awareness and use of the potential of the natural elements in design. This paper aims to assess and promote the enhancement of the natural elements in the voluntary green rating systems, as active tools in promoting environmental sustainability to all the actors of the building process. To this end, the study was developed through the following steps: 1. in the literature, identification of the elements of nature-based design with more evidence on environmental performance; 2. in green rating systems, identification of the weight given to the natural elements, evaluation of their current level of enhancement within the systems and identification of possible areas of development.
Bioplastics have proven to be a viable substitute for plastics in some sectors, although their use in construction is still limited. The construction sector currently uses 23% of the world’s plastic production, both for the materials themselves and for their packaging and protection. A considerable part is not recycled and is dispersed into the environment or ends up in landfills. In response to the environmental problems caused by oil-based plastic pollution, the development of biocomposite materials such as bioplastics represents a paradigm shift. This article aims to explain what bioplastics are, providing a classification and the description of the different properties and applications. It also lays out the most interesting uses of these materials in the construction field.
The European Commission has introduced a whole range of policies and initiatives to promote the product eco-innovation and the environmental impacts reductions. One of the key topic for the reduction of the environmental impacts is the waste recycling and reuse (turning waste into useful resources). A teamwork of Politecnico di Milano has developed a research work, still ongoing and continuously updated, called "The usefulness of the useless. Cross-sectorial evaluation of waste in construction" which regards the possible reuse of pre-consumer scrapes/waste, deriving from various sectors, as secondary raw materials for the supply chains of the building sector. The goals of research work are the identification of the chains with high production of pre-consumer waste and scraps, the classification of these wastes by typology, the definition of scenarios for the reuse/valorization of the identified waste and the improvement of the environmental profile of products through an integration of recycled content. The research starts from the study of the most significant supply chains inside various sectors, analyzing the input/output and defining typologies and characteristics of waste/scrapes. To simplify the identification of recycling scenarios, the supply chains and related typologies of scraps have been classified according to a typical Italian filing system code. Then the data have been collected in a matrix used to identify feasible strategies and scenarios for the valorization of waste (this represent the first result of the work). The same matrix is also useful for public and private stakeholders for pursuing strategies aiming to the generation of positive externalities, at local and at global level. The next step is the proposal of new products deriving from the waste/scraps collected during the first phase.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.