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Concrete and global warming
Concrete and global warming
We see that change of land use , under greenhouse conditons, warm the air differently. Roughly speaking if midday temperature outside is 20C, then the temperature will be about 22-24C in the greenhouse over turf, about 26-30C over bare soil and 28-35C with concrete. Multiply that all over the world and it must be gaving an impact on global warmin. Concrete warms the air.
Concrete & climate change
Concrete & climate change
There is an added issue. Warmer air holds more water. The Clausius-Clapeyron relation says for every degree Celsius the air warms, it can hold 7% more moisture. When the moisture condenses it releases heat energy, which can go into a storm, invigorates it, increases its updrafts and allows it to pull even more moisture from a larger area, which could boost rainfall as much as 20%. This may be a contribution to 'extreme weather events', which increasigly are being put down to 'climate change'.
How much of this contributed the dreadful flooding in Valencia 2024.
The Spanish are also concerned because Spain is also losing its rain. "A member of the European commission asked the meteorologist Millan Millan, who already had been collecting a lot of meteorological data about the area, to investigate. He found that deforestration, degradation and the paving over of the land were the culprits. Grasslands have less evapotranspiration than forests. Paved land has less evapotranspiration than grasslands. There was no longer enough evapotranspiration to add to the moisture blowing in from the ocean, to push the humidity over the saturation point. In order for rain to form, the air needed water contributions from both ocean and land, but the land contribution had been going down for decades."
(1 hour explanation). Warm air holds more water, so it is only when rises and cools does precipitation - rain - occur.
Construction
Construction
The rapid expansion of construction land has been a common phenomenon worldwide, which resulted in the loss of high-quality arable land and severe land degradation. There were concerns about this in the UK following WW2. called 'Garden Controversy', where it was deemed that food production was better in the gradens than the lost fields. However, the scale is now massive and worldwide, with many different chemicals involved.
Looking at local building sites, it is clear there is much less organic matter left in the topsoil than was there previoulsy. The builders have to put some back, back most is left severly comressed by the massive machines tha have been moving backwards and forwards on it. There should be a TV programme on how to construct your garden in a new build estate, and how long ot takes to sort the drainage and structure. That s a measure of what ios going on worldwide.
"A statistical analysis, together with a field investigation, was carried out in China to address the challenges. This study has gathered data on the reduction of land amount and quality caused by construction activities and has collected the relevant policies to control land deterioration caused by those activities. The increasing amount of farmland and open space are occupied by construction use. The annual growth of construction land from 2001 to 2017 was 43.64 × 104 hm2, with an annual average of about 38 × 104 hm2of cultivated land being converted to construction land in China. Construction activities usually cause a deterioration of the physico-chemical properties in and around construction site soils. The organic matter of post-construction soil was lower than the pre-construction by 257.4~879.8%. A lack of strong economic incentives for developers, limited effectiveness of measures to control land degradation, and weak requirements and enforcement of relevant laws and regulations allow land degradation from construction activities to remain at a significant level. For more efficiency and success, the study proposes effective measures to control the hazards that occur so widely in China". (Dai, Ma & Zhang 2022)
Contaminated land
Contaminated land
From Construction sites..In UK nearly half of all materials in waste sites is contaminated land from building sites.
In 2016 the UK generated 66.2 million tonnes of non-hazardous construction and demolition waste (C&D waste). This represents 62% of total UK waste.
To dump it there, inert waste is £3-4 ton, whereas hazardous waste is taxed at £100/tonne. So how much is really non-hazardous?
In 2021 the UK government raised £667 million from landfill tax receipts. This was an increase on the year before but a big fall from the peak of £1.2 billion in 2014. If half of this is from building sites, that equates to more than 300m
Brownfield Sites
Brownfield Sites
I heard that the reason the Labour government helped block the introduction of the EU’s Soil Framework Directive was because the EU wanted more restrictions on contaminated land, and that there was a lot of it in UK - more than EU. They are usually the sites of former factories, mines, tanneries, landfill or other heavy industry.
Certainly we have a lot of 'Brownfield' sites, many contaminated years ago, by materials like lead in paints, oils, tars and asbestos (Hellawell & Hughes 2021) , and even arsenic and radioactive substances
Top ten most contaminated land in UK If we are going to build more on these sites, they are gooing to have to get a lot moe attention.
Landfill Tax fraud
Landfill Tax fraud
"We are also seeing a big increase in unsuitable wastes from this industry being deposited at site’s without a suitable authorisation. Usually misdescription of waste is linked to tax avoidance"
In an industry worth 9b, there are bound to be some crooks, but governments seem to turn a blind eye Hansard 2023 The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report estimates that the cost of landfill tax fraud and waste crime is about £1 billion a year - there were widely differing estimates.
Compaction
Compaction
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