{
  "id": 7563722,
  "title": "Why less steel and concrete isn’t the same as more sustainable",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/15/why-less-steel-and-concrete-isnt-the-same-as-more-sustainable",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-15T13:00:42.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Anthropocene Magazine",
    "slug": "anthropocene-magazine",
    "url": "https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2026/09/why-less-steel-and-concrete-isnt-the-same-as-more-sustainable/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "When constructing buildings, the weight of materials used is significant. A recent study calculated the weight of over 600 million buildings in cities worldwide and found the total to be 835 billion metric tons (Gt), which is almost equivalent to the weight of all plants on Earth. This weight comes from materials like steel, wood, glass, cement, stone, and others. As cities continue to grow rapidly, this weight could increase by another 419 Gt by 2050 if current development patterns persist, warns researcher Jinchao Song from the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems.\n\nTraditionally, life-cycle analyses and green building certifications, such as LEED, focus on making buildings lighter through material efficiency. However, a second study by Fernanda Cruz Rios, a built environment scientist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, challenges this perspective. Rios argues that the resilience of buildings is equally important, especially in the face of increasing climate disasters. She compares two identical buildings—one directly built on the ground and the other on a raised concrete platform. The concrete platform increases construction-related carbon emissions. However, a major flood would make the ground-based building vulnerable to inundation, while the raised platform building would remain dry, potentially saving on costly repairs and occupant displacement. Rios argues that designing buildings to remain functional during disasters can prove more sustainable than simply prioritizing lighter materials.\n\nWhile some studies account for the impact of materials needed for repairs, Cruz Rios found that none of the 40 previously published life-cycle analyses considered all dimensions of building resilience. She highlights that disaster response actions, like evacuations and temporary fixes, also carry environmental costs, but these are often overlooked in the data. To address this gap, Rios proposes a new approach to life-cycle analysis that prioritizes resilience, measuring sustainability based on the building's material use in relation to the function it provides throughout its lifetime. Her lab is currently working to collect the necessary data to make this analysis practical.\n\nMoreover, the urban form of a city—its height, density, and uniformity of buildings—also plays a crucial role in material use, according to the first study. Dense, low-rise cities maximize per capita floor space per pound of building material. Jinchao Song, a researcher from the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems, was surprised to learn how much urban form can influence future material demand. If rapidly growing cities in the Global South adopt a dense, low-rise urban form, they could require about 30% less material compared to a less efficient arrangement of uniformly high-rise buildings. This finding underscores the importance of considering building sustainability across various levels of space and time when making early urban planning decisions.",
  "summary": "A provocative new study argues that a building's real environmental cost is measured by how well it survives disaster, not by how little it weighs.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}