We studied the extent and nature of fungal colonization of building materials in 58 naturally ventilated apartments that had suffered various kinds of water damage in relation to air sampling done before the physical inspections. The results of air samples from each apartment were compared by rank order of species with pooled data from outdoor air. Approximately 90% of the apartments that had s...

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In the United States, the predominant land use goal has been to extract and maximize profit from the land in the near term. Sustainability and its underlying concept of stewardship of the built environment run counter to this extraction-based philosophy. Beyond sustainability, the recognition of the value of existing buildings has resulted in a growing interest in historic preservation. Sustain...

Many industrial products that would traditionally be disposed of are now being recycled to reduce environmental pollution and conserve resources. Various techniques for the recovery, processing, and reuse of materials have been developed. Recently, the safety of reusing such materials has been investigated. Waste materials such as city garbage are generated in great quantities. In Japan, most g...

We use reflection terahertz spectroscopy to locate and produce three-dimensional images of air gaps between stones that resemble fractures, even of subwavelength thicknesses. This technique is found to be promising tool for sculpture and building damage evaluation as well as structural quality control in other dielectric materials.

Emerging opportunities are placing greater demands on device fabrication: next-generation microelectronics will need minimum features of less than 100 nm, high-throughput drug screening will require facile methods to incorporate sensitive biological components into microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and implantable devices will need to be built from biocompatible materials. Increasingly, th...

Porous carbon materials are advantageous in adsorbing pollutants due to their wide range of specific surface areas, pore diameter, and pore volume. Among the porous carbon materials in the current study, expanded graphite, xGnP, xGnP C-300, xGnP C-500, and xGnP C-750 were prepared as adsorbent materials. Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis was conducted to select the adsorbent material throug...

Sludge dewatering and treatment may cost as much as the wastewater treatment. Usually large proportion of the pollutants in wastewater is organic. They are attacked by saprophytic microorganisms, i.e. organisms that feed upon dead organic matter. Activity of organisms causes decomposition of organic matter and destroys them, where the bacteria convert the organic matter or other constituents in...

During the 1970s the building industry witnessed a focus on energy-conserving building materials sparked by oil-price increases; during the 1980s attention to building materials that reduced or omitted pollutants became important as a result of the "Sick Building Syndrome" or indoor air pollution. Now, in the 1990s, we are engaged with a more comprehensive definition of environmental materials ...

The SAPICO2 project is an INTERREG IVA cross channel collaboration established to develop new technologies utilising accelerated carbonation for the creation of eco-construction materials from solid wastes. Over three phases, the project has identified carbon dioxide reactivity of solid wastes, produced prototype-construction materials (from these wastes), and manufactured bulk samples of carbo...