poor building performance fuels coal demand – Ffos-y-fran

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Coal is back in the news today … from the Guardian:

Around 30 climate activists and local residents this morning took mass direct action to prevent excavation work on Britain’s biggest ever open-cast coal mine at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales, (… timed to coincide with the Bali conference)

Climate protester, Tim Helweg-Larsen, said: “Coal is the filthiest fuel known to man and projects like this mine could destroy all our chances of tackling global warming. The battle over this hilltop in Wales is a fight for the stability of the global climate and it epitomises this government’s hypocrisy on climate change.”

When burned, this amount of coal will emit more than 30m tonnes of carbon dioxide.

More than 10,000 local people petitioned against the pit, the edge of which will be just 36 metres from people’s homes.

Merthyr resident, Leon Stanfield, said: “We’ve protested this mine in all the conventional ways. Now we’re turning to direct action as a last resort. This project is wrecking both the local and the global environment and is putting the health of our community and its children at risk.”

Miller Argent says it appreciates the concerns expressed by some (sic) local residents. Once works are commenced it said it would be able to ensure that the concerns of the local community are met.

(MillerArgents newsletter to keep people up to date with progress seems to have stalled at Issue 01 back in the Summer – which greenwash sin is this I wonder?)

But on a wider issue: Continue reading →

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?

spot the greenwashing sins

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Greenwashing is a common theme on this blog and a topic I keep an igoogle eye on.  Along with carbon offsetting, green-washing can be seen as unnecessary distractors, distracting energy and focus away from the real task in hand of sustainability and ‘greening’ the built environment industries.

It was then good to note a recent report from TerraChoice,  Six Sins of Greenwashing.

The research looked at 1,018 products making 1,753 claims. And although the products studied included a wide range of offerings, from air fresheners to appliances, televisions to toothpaste, the conclusions are typical of all green advertising.  Worryingly of those products, all but one made claims that are either demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.

The sins provide a good guide to ‘testing’ claims made by companies and or advertisements.

Happy spotting.   In fact isite will start a rogues gallery of greenwash  sins, relevant to the built environment industry – watch this space for a related blog space.  In the meantime if you spot any blatant greenwash – please leave details in the comments below.

The sins:

Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off--(made by 57 percent of all environmental claims examined)  claims that suggest a product or company is “green” based on a single environmental attribute (the recycled content of paper, for example)
Sin of No Proof (26%)–any claim that couldn’t be substantiated by easily accessible supporting information, or by a reliable third-party certification.

Sin of Vagueness (11 %)–any claim that is so poorly defined or broad that its real meaning is likely to be misunderstood by the intended consumer, such as “chemical free” or “all natural.”

Sin of Irrelevance (4 %)–claims that may be truthful but are unimportant and unhelpful for consumers, such as CFC-free products, since ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons have been outlawed since the late 1980s.

Sin of Lesser of Two Evils (1%)–environmental claims that may be true, but that risk distracting the consumer from the greater environmental impacts of the category as a whole, such as organic cigarettes.

Sin of Fibbing (<1%)- claims that are simply false, typically by misusing or misrepresenting certification by an independent authority, when no such certification had been made.

Greenwash Definition: Greenwash  is a term that is used to describe the actions of a company, government, or other organization which advertises positive environmental practices while acting in the opposite way.

The term is generally used when significantly more money or time has been spent advertising being green , rather than spending resources on environmentally sound practices. This is often portrayed by changing the name or label of a product, to give the feeling of nature, for example putting an image of a forest on a bottle of harmful chemicals.Links:

Terrachoice

Joel Makower 

Triple Bottom Line 

offsetting problems

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Financial problems in the mysterious (and distracting) world of carbon offsetting reported in todays Guardian

The fledgling carbon-offset market was undermined yesterday when AgCert International, a producer and seller of certified emission reductions (CERs), said a key deal had collapsed leaving it with an overhang of uncovered liabilities … more

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

Integrated Project Delivery

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ExtranetEvolution posted an in-depth review and commentary on the recently published Integrated Project Delivery guide, from the AIA in the US. Thinking this would be all IT and Technology I have given the guide a quick scan, but a few things caught my eye for a more in-depth read. As a Constructing Excellence‘s Collaborative Working Champion , I liked the opening…

Envision a new world where …

... facilities managers, end users, contractors and suppliers are all involved at the start of the design process
… processes are outcome-driven and decisions are not made solely on a first cost basis
… all communications throughout the process are clear, concise, open, transparent, and trusting
… designers fully understand the ramifications of their decisions at the time the decisions are made
… risk and reward are value-based and appropriately balanced among all team members over the life of a project
… the industry delivers a higher quality and sustainable built environment

Note the order of the first bullet point – facilities managers first. This resonates back to the early work between Constructing Excellence (then BE) and the Centre for Facilities Management, with a clever title of abecfm , where the future was envisaged as facilities managers as the process broker for the whole process, from user requirements to design to construction to building in use. This related to expressions such as the industry formerly known as construction (Richard Saxon) and the the industry formerly known as fm (yours truly)

Is this then the world of Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)…. (It will be interesting to see if the rest of the paper delivers a route or road map this new world – watch this space – or Pauls blog at ExtranetEvolution )

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 →