Green Building Materials, Residential VOC Emissions, and Carbon-Neutral Healthy Housing: A Sustainability-Oriented Assessment
Keywords:
Green building materials; Volatile organic compounds; Indoor air quality; Carbon neutrality; Healthy housing; Sustainability assessment; Life cycle assessment; Policy integrationAbstract
The global built environment confronts a dual challenge: decarbonizing housing stocks to meet climate targets while safeguarding indoor environmental quality, particularly concerning volatile organic compound (VOC) exposures from building materials. This paper presents a sustainability-oriented assessment that systematically examines the interconnections among green building material selection, residential VOC emissions, and the emergence of carbon-neutral healthy housing. Adopting a systems-level perspective, the analysis exposes structural trade-offs between embodied carbon reduction, energy efficiency, and chemical safety that are inadequately captured by prevailing certification frameworks and life cycle assessment boundaries. It argues that the architecture of performance standards, material databases, and building information modeling systems must be re-engineered to incorporate dynamic indoor exposure pathways and health impact metrics. The discussion spans material chemistry, ventilation infrastructure, occupant exposure patterns, and multi-criteria decision-support tools, with attention to uncertainty, environmental justice, and robustness of assessments. Governance mechanisms, including building codes, product labeling, and smart monitoring networks, are evaluated for their capacity to align carbon-neutral trajectories with health-protective outcomes. The paper further integrates insights from digital twinning and adaptive ventilation control as enablers of responsive healthy housing. By synthesizing literature across building physics, exposure science, life cycle assessment, and policy studies, the study advances an integrated framework in which carbon neutrality and residential health are co-optimized rather than traded off. The conclusion highlights research needs for transdisciplinary data architectures, dynamic exposure models, and policy mixes that can bridge the current fragmentation between green material innovation and indoor air quality regulation.
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