Environmentally Friendly Materials in Construction

Dear Colleagues,

Older buildings consume an excessive amount of energy and produce too much waste. Their operation is also linked with the consumption of about 25 percent of the world’s water and 40 percent of its resources, while creating one-third of all waste and 40 percent of global carbon emissions. Despite these statistics related to buildings’ unsustainability, buildings have a huge untapped potential to become a key part of the solution to urgent sustainability challenges. One of the important ways to improve the sustainability of buildings is to produce environmentally friendly materials and to design new eco-friendly building constructions. New eco-friendly designs of buildings based on the construction of environmentally friendly materials can improve human health, safety, comfort, and productivity in the current conditions of climate change. Environmentally friendly materials must become part of a sustainable world building design because their production and use could provide minimization of the negative environmental impacts. These impacts are representing by climate change, ozone layer depletion, acidification of soil and water, resource exhaustion or human toxicity in connection to indoor and outdoor air pollution. Therefore, it is very important to include sustainability ideas into products, operations, and research and development in order to apply the best available technologies and produce materials/products leaving a smaller negative environmental footprint in the process. Life cycle analysis (LCA) offers a useful and widely accepted methodology for assessment of ecofriendly sustainability and environmental performance of buildings. We invite you to submit high-quality research or review papers to this Special Issue, with an emphasis on new environmentally friendly building materials (concrete, mortars, plasters, bricks, insulating, and hybrid materials) and technologies. Some areas of interests for this Special Issue include but are not limited to environmental benefits of composites incorporating alternative substances and fiber-reinforced biocomposites. Papers aimed at environmentally acceptable composition of materials in construction, designing environmentally friendly construction buildings and environmental assessment of building materials, constructions, and buildings will be welcome. Papers will be accepted for this Special Issue after going through a rigorous peer-review procedure.

Prof. Dr. Nadezda Stevulova
Prof. Dr. Adriana Estokova
Guest Editors

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