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What Is the Best Way to Take Care of Buildings?

- Jamie Filer, Steven Schuldt, & Andrew Hoisington

In addition to costing money, each building also has an impact on the environment around it. These impacts are often negative. For example, the land your house was built on was cleared of plants and trees. Removing plants forces the animals that lived there to move, which is bad for the environment. The wood used to construct the walls was collected with equipment that runs on fossil fuels and pollutes the air. When the roof gets replaced, the old material is taken to a landfill. And if we do not take care of the air conditioning system properly, the fluids needed to run it can be harmful to the air we breathe.
Let us think even bigger than a single component. As you may imagine, larger buildings, like factories, require more maintenance than your house because they have more components. If a factory has five air conditioning units instead of one, how can the owners possibly track when each air conditioning unit needs to be replaced? The components that make up a building cannot last forever.

License information: CC BY 4.0
MPAA: G
Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2020.00028

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