Category Archives: sustainability

Zero carbon schools

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Ed Balls,  Education Secretary wants all new school buildings to be zero-carbon by 2016, at a cost of about £110m over the next three years.  (Guardian)

How this sits with Building Schools for the Future (which arguable should include carbon zero approaches, which after all will be the schools of the future) and what happens after three years, remains to be seen.

Good to see another target being set.  Lets hope that the Strategy for Sustainable Construction will bring clarity and some sense of joined up thinking to all initaitives, codes, targets etc.

Code level 6 builder announced for eco village number one

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From the Communities and Local Governmnet website:

Housing and Planning Minister Yvette Cooper today announced details of the housebuilder who will build England’s first eco-village.  Barratt Developments PLC has been selected by English Partnerships, the Government’s National Regeneration Agency, as the preferred developer to create a new community at the site of the former Hanham Hall Hospital near Bristol. Homes on the site will meet the Government’s most exacting eco standard – Level 6 of the Code for Sustainable Homes.

This is a site and location I know very well … being close to the area I grew up in and cut my teeth in the industry as a site engineer a few years ago (!) …  aware of the campaigns by local residents not happy with plans to turn a former farming and greenbelt area into housing … so a project I will watch with interest.

And therefore also of interest on a wider sustainability issue:

… this ground-breaking project will create eco lifestyles. It will hand over a listed building to community use, capture rainwater and include sustainable drainage, farmers’ shops, a car club and bicycle storage.

Sustainability Code for non domestic buildings

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Following the Code for housing which seems to be setting the sustaintainbility agenda the industry, the UKGBC UK Green Building Council today launched a report on behalf of the government that starts to set out an agenda for acheiving zero carbon non-domestic buildings by 2020
From the press release at UKGBC:

Key findings in the report are as follows:

1)   It IS possible to reduce carbon emissions from energy use down to zero in the majority of new non-domestic buildings, as long as on-site, near-site and off-site renewable solutions are employed

2)   There is a cost associated with building to zero carbon. Cost varies widely with both the form and the use of the building. However, preliminary modeling suggest that the premium could range from over 30% down to as low as 5 or 10% of current baseline costs.

3)   A challenging yet achievable time-frame for achieving zero carbon new non-domestic buildings along the lines set for housing is needed. With a trajectory in place similar to that adopted for the Code for Sustainable Homes, then a deadline of 2020 could be adopted.

Will this report, like the code for housing and BREEAM will now shape the direction for construction and the built environment for the next decade.  As fellow blogger Phil over at Zero-Champion points out in his review of this report – a move from rhetoric to reality.

My initial thoughts on the costs associated with moving to carbon zero is that the ‘preliminary modeling’ figures are similar to the figures used to describe the ‘waste’ in the industry, (ie total waste or muda. – time, costs, lack of integration, non value-adding,  unproductive activities, reworking, delays, as well as material waste).

Therefore a renewed drive on business improvement and collaborative working would pay for zero carbon buildings and facilities.  (this is to some degree supported in the Strategy for Sustainable Construction which includes the Strategic Forums target for an integrated industry to support a sustainable one)

I shall be returning to this  with further posts when I have digested the report

Merton Rule ‘plus’ in new planning policy statement

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The Guardian reports today that the Merton rule has now been embedded into a new planning policy statement.

The government will today publish a new planning policy designed to boost the use of renewable energy and community heating schemes in new buildings as it gears up for the introduction of carbon-free homes from 2016 … requiring new commercial buildings to produce at least 10% of their energy from on-site renewables.

So another target milestone for the industry looms.  However in the (rising) scale of things only 10% from renewables by 2016 seems paltry.

on tranisition towns – community based fm in action

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I read the recent Ecologist article on Transition Totnes with great interest and delved deeper into understanding the transition movement, an initiative that responds to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Best described from the Transition Wiki as:

A Transition Initiative is a community that is unleashing its own latent collective genius to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and to discover and implement ways to address this BIG question:

“for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?”

As the Ecologist article illustrates, and the initiative wiki demonstrates this movement could have a significant effect on the built assets and facilities within a community and how they are used, and ‘greened’ .

Yet more importantly Transition Towns can be seen as a great example of Community Based Facilities Management (CbFM) and community collaborative working  in action.

Incidentally the transition towns site lists some 25 towns or communities within the initiative to date – is yours there?

framework award winners

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Hampshire county council picked up the Innovation and progress, finance and procurement award in this years Guardian Public Services Awards.   As reported in last the award supplement last wednesday, the council are gearing up the framework approach to cover £3bn of construction across all public services in Hampshire, with predicted savings of over £40m.

The framework pre-approves contractors regionally, claims to halve lead in times and reduce advertising and procurement costs and deals with the sustainability approach of encouraging the use of more local contractors.

Winner: Hampshire County Council on behalf of the South East Centre of Excellence (SECE)
On behalf of SECE, Hampshire County Council has pioneered a new approach to procuring and managing this work. The SECE Major Framework is about streamlining procurement processes and delivering improved performance and efficiencies. It is also about ambition, innovation, and collaboration.

on BREEAM

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Mel over at Elemental posted an interesting and useful round up of BREEAM stuff. BREEAM and LEED (the US version) is certainly in the news at the moment, with both appearing to develop into specific sectors of construction. Rightly or wrongly BREAM and LEED will become central to achieving carbon neutrality and other sustainable targets in the coming years.

I am still not convinced of the benefits of these schemes over the life of a facility and contribution to the users business or organisational costs. (ie a focus on the 1, rather than the 5 or 200 from the 1:5:200 school of thinking)

My comments left in response to Mels article are copied below…would appreciate your thoughts…

…BREEAM and LEED tend to be taking off in all directions – much as the EFQM did 5 or so years ago – can this be a good thing or is it a watering down of a good original concept?

We are seeing more and more targets being set to achieve BREEAM Excellent for this or that sector, yet for the construction and fm sectors this means very little, so is ignored.

Even with the more eco aware construction organisations , their contribution to the whole process is sometimes seen as too limited, (patronising maybe?) ie around waste, transport etc, rather than making real contribution to the environmental life cycle of the facility, so again drops quickly to the bottom of the to do lists.

getting to zero

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One of the excellent articles on the new Building Sustainability site is The Year to Zero.  putting many of the important targets and objectives being set for our industry in a chronoligical count down to carbon zero, neutral or ‘sustainability’. (or wherever its is deemed we need to be)
The article, in conjunction with Fulcron Consultaing will be updated as and when more targets are set, so definelty one to watch.

I use a similar approach, looking into the ‘planned future’ for our sector, helping organisations set their own strategies and targets, on green and other related topics.  How do your business or improvement plans map onto this timeline?  Will you be ahead of the game, prepared, or lagging and playing catchup? Do you even have a route-map to get you there?

New building sustainability site launch

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Work has kept me from blogging for the last week or so … plenty to catch up with though.

First up is the welcome for Phil’s (he blogs at sustainability blog) new  Building Sustainability site project that launched this week.

Looks good Phil. One to bookmark, RSS etc

lack of education on green finances a barrier to sustainability?

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How do we deal with education of green financial benefits in eduction?

The recent and excellent copy of GetSust Issue 31 from Melanie Thompson carries a feature on the recent CIOB study:

A UK survey says the construction industry is poised to fully embrace sustainability, while two recent international studies have found that construction clients and tenants are putting ‘green’ buildings at the top of their shopping lists. All that’s lacking, it seems, is a leap of faith. Could post-occupancy evaluation (POE) push the two sides together?

A study commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) suggests that the vast majority of construction professionals believe that ‘green’ building is the future for the construction industry.

Of the 850 construction professionals questioned, 94 per cent believe that ‘green’ building is the future for construction, and 86 per cent believe that there are financial benefits to producing energy efficient buildings.

And contrary to expectation, 67 per cent of respondents felt that the current UK building regulations do not go far enough to create energy efficient buildings.

Commenting on the survey results, Michael Brown CIOB deputy chief executive put the lack of up-take of the green message down to “…a shortage of client awareness and education towards the financial benefits for building green projects”.

For more on this and the Get Sust service, and win a T Shirt go to Get Sust Continue reading →