Category Archives: sustainability

The future of the Code for Sustainable Homes – Making a rating mandatory

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From the Communities and  Local Government website:

The Code measures the sustainability of a new home. It went live in England as a voluntary standard in April 2007. This consultation document follows on from the positive response received to Building a Greener Future: Towards Zero Carbon Development, where we asked if rating against the Code should be mandatory.

Consultation is aimed at Housing development industry, architects, construction companies, planners, energy efficiency specialists, environmental stakeholders and academics.

Goodbye zero champion…hello sustainability blog…

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Zero Champion blog has been re-branded and given a face lift, as Zero Hero ** says

It’s part of the development I’m working on which will see this space being integrated more closely to the websites my company publishes – Building, Building Design, Property Week and Building Services Journal

check out the new look at Sustainability Blog

** (sorry couldn’t resist that)

open source sustainability

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I am becoming more and more aware of and convinced of the role that open source approaches and concepts can have in our built environment.  Based on the open source approach to IT, we are starting to see open source architecture…education …and sustainability.  In addition I see benchmark and best practice clubs transforming themselves into innovation circles or networks.  (Perhaps the next generation of Construction Best Practice Clubs??)
In essence, to me it means collaboratively working together to address sustainability issues, focusing effort on what matters,  promoting access to the design and production of goods and knowledge, rather than everyone focusing on their own thing, duplicating effort, be it a product, strategy or service.

Competitiveness arises from starting at a more mature level.

What is open source, one of the best definitions comes from, Open Eco Source  a web base tool, which ‘will help speed up the distribution of available knowledge and connect efforts that aim to create a sustainable environment’

The three rules for open source are: nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and everybody can improve it. … The open source web-base tools are fantastically powerful and the fastest collaborative media we have to shape our future.

or the wiki definition:

Open source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge.

Building purple haze…

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The post to Worldchanging on green issues in New York City caught my eye over the weekend:

Around 85 percent of all the buildings that will exist in New York City in 25 years are already standing, according to reporter J. Alex Tarquino in this past Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. 80 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas pollution is created by building energy use — with residential buildings taking up about one-third of that energy.

So however advanced green building methods become, however energy-efficient, we’re going to make the biggest gains in cutting energy use — thus lowering particulate and greenhouse gas pollution — by transforming these older buildings.

Even though the New York way of living is inherently very energy-efficient, compared to other American cities or communities, we can do better, reports Tarquino:

The article makes a valid point of focusing equally on the facilities management aspect of the built enviroment as the construction.

There are so many figures around as to the built environments contribution to carbon and other ”greenhouse’ gases.

Sometimes it feels we are patting fog…do we really know? As Dave over at Carbon Coach has been pointing out for many years now…if carbon gases were purple then the sky would have changed colour in our lifetimes,  and we would be living in a purple haze now – but we would take action …but as its colourless…we don’t.

ithink comment – smoking ban – environmental timebomb?

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i-think has posted this thought provoking comment.  Log on to i-think to join the debate and comment.

The smoking ban has occasioned much debate from both the pro- and anti- camps, but now it seems that the new law could also lead to an unexpected environmental backlash.

A recent survey by British Gas asserts that the average gas-fired patio heater emits more CO2 per year than a Range Rover and the sudden upsurge in patio heaters, used to warm determined smokers who flock outside pubs for their much-needed cigarette breaks, could be drastically harming the environment.

Based on the usage of patio heaters in Scotland post its smoking ban in March 2006, British Gas estimates that now the whole of the UK is smoke-free patio heaters in pubs will emit up to 160,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

According to Darren Johnson – Green Party member of the London assembly “each patio heater generates 2.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide on average per year – the equivalent to driving a car for over 6,000 miles”. In layman’s terms, some claim that patio heaters installed in pubs could produce as much carbon dioxide as a small city.

So what’s the alternative? Should the hardened smoker simply have to reach for another jumper, as the Lib Dem environmental spokesman Normal Baker has suggested? Or are these figures just a massive case of over-inflated scaremongering?

Green Lessons for New Schools (BSF Update)

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Mile Barter, communications at Lancs BSF, has sent in the following update:

Pupils from Burnley are using the building of their new school to learn about the environment – and to encourage action to stop global warming.  The 11 and 12-year-olds from Shuttleworth College, on Kiddrow Lane, have set up a sustainability project as part of their science learning.  They are researching the school’s carbon footprint and finding ways of reducing energy consumption Continue reading →

sustainable reposnses from ce

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Noted on the CE (Constructing Excellence) web news pages (why is there no RSS feed here?) the responses that CE have made to the number of sustainability consultation documents around at the moment.   Of interest is the CE response to legislation on waste management plans.

(you may have to register to get access to these pages)

civil sustainability

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the recently launched civil engineering sustainability strategy can be downloaded from the CIRIA news site. (Can’t locate it on the ICE site which seems the obvious place!)

Well worth a read, I particularly like the aims:

Aim 1 Promote strong leadership for sustainable development within civil engineering There is a need for strong commitment and leadership at all levels, including clients, to tap into the enormous potential of civil engineering to protect the environment and promote sustainable development.

leadership is vital and it will interesting to watch how leaders in this sector become role models

But equally as interesting is Aim 3

Build capacity for sustainable development in civil engineering building capacity for sustainable development is about equipping organisations and individuals with the understanding, skills and access to independent information, knowledge and training that enables them to perform effectively.

It will again be interesting to see how this emerges, and whether an open source approach to knowledge share and education is adopted (open source sustainability)

I noted no mention of measuring the ecological (or carbon) footprint of civil engineering activities.

Sustainable development or jobs for the boys?

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 Recent comments from the team at i-think – what do yu think?  Join the debate at  i-think

Sustainable development or jobs for the boys?

The Communities and Local Government department says the Government’s ‘Planning for a Sustainable Future: White Paper’ “proposes reforms on how we take decisions on nationally significant infrastructure projects – including energy, waste, waste-water and transport – responding to the challenges of economic globalisation and climate change. It also proposes further reforms to the Town and Country Planning system, building on the recent improvements to make it more efficient and more responsive.”

Friends of the Earth say that “sustainable development is being stripped apart to benefit big business. These proposals are bad for people, bad for democracy and bad for the environment … They will leave affected communities with no meaningful say in how their area is developed.”

What do you think? Click here to comment on i-Think.com.

Climate Change for the Masses

The plethora of recent events designed to tackle climate change culminated last week in Live Earth, Al Gore’s much publicised 24-hour, 7-continent concert series. With the aim of triggering a mass global movement in response to the climate change agenda, more than 100 musical acts were united in order to reach a worldwide audience of an estimated 2 billion people.

So do these essentially ‘consumer’ events help or hinder the cause? Live Earth has been criticised for being little more than a middle-of-the-road publicity stunt and, with many of the acts arriving via international air travel, could be seen as making a mockery of the entire underlying message.

And yet maybe that’s the point. Live Earth may not have had any measurable effect in terms of tackling global warming, but at least we all know what the point of the event was. As Environment Secretary Hilary Benn pointed out, “Events like Live Earth can help to bring people together to encourage them to take action locally, nationally, and internationally and with more than 40% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions coming from people’s homes and travel, inspiring people to act is increasingly urgent.”

Perhaps the message that we should take away from Live Earth is one of inclusiveness. Clearly business organisations need to play their part in reducing carbon emissions, but corporates should not be expected to shoulder the full weight of responsibility.

Research commissioned by DEFRA found that although 94% of British people think that the world’s climate is changing, only 66% say that they are personally taking action to limit this change. So what about the other 28%?

Using low energy lightbulbs, less of a reliance on air-conditioning and/or heating, switching off electrical appliances rather than merely leaving them on stand-by and a careful consideration of transport options are among the easiest changes that we can all make right across our every day lives.

Climate change is a big deal, but living and working sustainably, even at a personal level, need not be.

Log on to i-think to comment.

Carbon Footprint – definition – useful?

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Recently published paper from ISA-UK Research & Consulting, based in Durham looks at the commonly used term of ‘Carbon Footprint’

definition of ‘carbon footprint’.

The term ‘carbon footprint’ has become very popular over the last few years and is now in widespread public use. With climate change high up on the political and corporate agenda, carbon footprint assessments are in strong demand.

The paper suggests the following definition, which may be useful in understanding the carbon footprint of  the construction process, the building or facility itself as well as  the facilities management aspects.

“The carbon footprint is a measure of the exclusive total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that is directly and indirectly caused by an activity or is accumulated over the life stages of a product.”

(my italics)

In any case, all direct (on-site, internal) and indirect emissions (off-site, external, embodied, upstream, downstream) need to be taken into account.

download the paper from ISA UK here