Look through the texts again and be ready to speak about “Toxic Materials in Modern Buildings”

Text 3

1. Read the text without the dictionary:

LONGER LIFE

Materials with a longer life relative to other materials designed for the same purpose need to be replaced less often. This reduces the natural resources required for manufacturing and the amount of money spent on installation and the associated labor. Durable materials that require less frequent replacement will require fewer raw materials and will produce less landfill waste over the building’s lifetime.

The durability of materials is an important factor in analyzing a building’s life-cycle costs. Materials that last longer will, over a building’s useful life, be more cost-effective than materials that need to be replaced more
often. By looking at durability issues, the selection of initially expensive materials like slate or tile can often be justified by their longer life spans.

Maintenance consumes a significant portion of a building’s operating budget: over the building’s lifetime, maintenance can easily exceed
the original construction costs. This includes the cost of labor, cleaning/polishing materials, equipment, and the replacement of some items. This is especially important for surfaces or systems that must be cleaned with petroleum-based solvents.

Reusability is a function of the age and durability of a material. Very durable materials may have many useful years of service left when the building in which they are installed is decommissioned, and may be easily extracted and reinstalled in a new site. Windows and doors, plumbing fixtures, and even brick can be successfully reused. Timber from old barns has become fashionable as a reclaimed material for new construction. The historic preservation movement in this country has spawned an entire industry devoted to salvaging architectural elements of buildings
scheduled for demolition. These materials are used in the renovation
of old buildings as well as in new construction.

Recyclability measures a material’s capacity to be used as a resource in the creation of new products. Steel is the most commonly recycled building material, in large part because it can be easily separated from construction debris by magnets. Many building materials that cannot be reused in their entirety can be broken down into recyclable components. Often, it is the difficulty of separating rubble from demolition that prevents more materials from being recycled. Once separated, glass is very easy to recycle: post-consumer glass is commonly used as a raw material in making window glass, ceramic tile, and brick. Concrete, unlike steel and glass, cannot be reformed once set, but it can be ground up and used as aggregate in new concrete or as road bedding. Currently, very little concrete and glass from site demolition is recycled because of the difficulty in separating these materials from construction debris.

Plastics alone are easy to recycle but are often integrated into other components which makes separation difficult or impossible. Plastic laminates are generally adhered to plywood or particleboard, making these wood products also hard to recycle. Some foam insulation can be reformed, but the majority cannot. Foam insulation can, like glass, be used as filler in concrete and roadbeds.

2. Answer the questions:

1. What are the properties of building materials?

2. What does the selection of initially expensive materials depend on?

3. What do maintenance consumes include?

4. What parts of demolished buildings can be reusable?

5. Could you explain the difference between reusability and recyclability?

6. What are the most commonly recycled building materials?