Material factors for buildings, roads and rail-based infrastructure in CONUS

Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. The data presented hereinafter constitute that basis for quantifying material stocks in a country that exhibits one of the highest material stocks in the world, the United States.

Data
This dataset includes the following material intensities:

• material intensity in mass per volume of above-ground building (kg/m³) per building type
• material intensity in mass per area of road (kg/m²) per road type
• material intensity in mass per area of railway track (kg/m²) per railway type
• material intensity in mass per area (kg/m²) per other infrastructure type

Material intensity factors are split into the following 15 material categories: metals (iron/steel, copper, aluminum, all other metals), non-metallic minerals (concrete, bricks, glass, aggregate except for concrete, all other minerals), biomass-based materials (timber, other biomass-based materials), petrochemical-based materials (bitumen, other petrochemical-based materials), insulation, and other materials. 

Material intensity factors are available for each of the following 19 aggregated stock type categories: 

• Buildings: low-rise residential (RES-LR), mid-rise residential (RES-MR), low/mid-rise residential / commercial mixed use (RCMU), high-rise residential / commercial mixed use (RCMU-HR), residential / commercial mixed use skyscrapers (RCMU-SKY), commercial / industrial (C/I), and mobile homes and light-weight buildings (MLB)
• Roads: motorway, primary roads, secondary roads, tertiary roads, local roads, rural roads
• Rail-based infrastructure: railway, subway, tram
• Other: airport runways, parking lots, other remaining impervious

Since construction standards for residential buildings and gravel roads vary between different climate zones across the conterminous United States, material intensities for low-rise residential buildings (RES-LR), local roads and tracks were further differentiated according to climate zones.

In addition, the following building volume conversion factors required for deriving material intensity factors for buildings are included in the dataset:

• floor-to-floor height per building type
• roof volume factors (m³/m² footprint) per building type
• share of useable area (SUA) in gross floor area per building type

Building volume conversion factors are based on Haberl et al. (2021) and were used in the calculation of the above-ground volume for those case studies where either the floor-to-floor height or information regarding the roof volume were unavailable, or where only the UA, but not the GFA necessary for the calculation of the above-ground volume were specified.

Further information
The dataset complements a scientific article in preparation which will include further information and an in-depth dataset description. For further information, please see the publication below or contact Dominik Wiedenhofer (dominik.wiedenhofer@boku.ac.at). 

D. Frantz, F. Schug, D. Wiedenhofer, A. Baumgart, D. Virág, S. Cooper, C. Gomez-Medina, F. Lehmann, T. Udelhoven, S. van der Linden, P. Hostert, H. Haberl. Weighing the US Economy: Map of Built Structures Unveils Patterns in Human-Dominated Landscapes. In prep

Check out this peer-reviewed article detailing the overall approach and novel method:

H. Haberl, D. Wiedenhofer, F. Schug, D. Frantz, D. Virág, C. Plutzar, K. Gruhler, J. Lederer, G. Schiller, T. Fishman, M. Lanau, A. Gattringer, T. Kemper, G. Liu, H. Tanikawa, S. van der Linden, P. Hostert, High-Resolution Maps of Material Stocks in Buildings and Infrastructures in Austria and Germany. Environ Sci Technol. 55, 3368–3379 (2021), doi:10.1021/acs.est.0c05642

Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society.

Funding
This research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950).