Tag Archives: BREEAM

Not a good day for Green Building

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Not a good day for Green Building in the USA.

Lloyd Alter on TreeHugger reports that the Green Building Initiative, which runs the Green Globes building certification system has been recognised as a LEED alternative by the federal General Services Administration

I feel sad for friends, colleagues, advocates in the US who are passionate in defending real green building and real building product transparency that will restore the damage done by the built environment.

Lloyd writes: The lobby organization formed last year to kill LEED and counting among its members just about every toxic chemical manufacturer in the USA, is ecstatic, but pushing for more …

The US Green Building Council that runs the LEED program put on a brave face in a press release, saying “At this point, it is unassailable, LEED works. It has played a significant role in GSA’s achievement of its energy and sustainability goals.”

Dream on. Green Globes is now recognized as legit and will eat your lunch; it’s cheaper, it lets builders use all that plastic, and doesn’t give points for FSC certified lumber. In state after state, the politicians paid for by the plastics industry will insist upon it.

Unfortunately I see this as a discussion, then argument and battle waiting to happen here in the UK and Europe. As we push for deeper green standards such as the Living Building Challenge, for deeper product transparency, as Google and other clients will undoubtedly push for non toxic red list materials in their buildings, we will see the push from the power of the petro-chemical, plastics  and big lumber organisations, resisting change for healthy products.

And unfortunately I see our UK Greenest Government Ever likely to side with these giants, removing as they already are in numerous areas, environmental protection so as not to damage industry and growth, headed by an Environmental Minister who is taking  green policy back to the 70s

The UK green build fraternity, advocates, green build councils and accreditation organisations needs to hold strong in the coming years.

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A tipping point for sustainability

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Could this be one of the key important concept diagrams for sustainability and environmental impact?

Snapseed‘Restorative sustainability’ in one simple graphic.

This brilliant  slide came to my attention via a @melanieloftus tweeted picture  taken during Jason McLennan’s presentation, Mind the Gap at the Living Futures conference, positioning Living Building Challenge beyond LEED. 

Reflecting on this simple model, we can visualise the impact of our current built environment sustainability approaches – are they just doing less bad, or really doing more good and making a restorative, positive contribution?

And importantly we can visualise that tipping point for sustainability, from less bad to more good.

The urgency for reconsidering ‘sustainability’ was emphasised in the recent report State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? The term sustainable has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative.

Is it time to abandon the sustainability concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability?

The Living Building Challenge, as a philosophy, an advocacy and assessment scheme has real significance. It enables us to cross the sustainability rubicon, setting a vision for a future built environment and encouraging owners, designers, constructors, operators and users to track towards it. As commented on the opening of the Bullitt Centre in Seattle a LBC accreditation hopeful, such approaches are driving a wedge into the future so others can see whats possible.

I feel honoured to be a Living Building UK Ambassador, spreading the message of the Challenge as fresh sustainability thinking into the UK built environment agenda.

For more information and planned events for the Challenge in the UK , check out our presentation to Green Build Expo, visit the Living Building website,  follow us on @UK_LBC on twitter or say hi via email. (We even have a facebook page to like!)

Related Post: Have we picked the low hanging fruit of Sustainable Construction?

Counting construction carbons with ConstructCO2

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This blog has reported on numerous occasions (eg here and here) on the need to measure and improve carbon emissions from construction activities separately from that of the building itself or the facility in use. And the need for an easy, simple to use tool.

As noted many of the available applications for calculating carbons were linked dubiously to carbon offsetting schemes.  Of note for use in construction were the Google Carbon tool (but not construction specific enough) and the Environment Agency tool (but is proving to be too detailed and cumbersome for most projects)

Measuring and improving carbons on site is increasingly important as more and more projects seek higher standards to BREEAM and Code for Sustainable Homes (and soon Non Dom Buildings).  One recent project set ‘damages’ for the contractor not achieving the ‘management points’ (for waste, CO2 and considerate constructor standard) for CSH at £40k per point. (See the CSH Technical Manual for more on this)

Recently at EcoBuild Paul Morrell, Construction Tsar commented  that focus on carbon emissions should be a number one site priority as it is measurable and addresses other areas of ‘waste’ in the industry

And yet the majority of contracts just do not know their project carbon footprint, whether its close to 1tonne or over 100tonne. We do not have a feel for the magnitude of emissions, or indeed what 1kg of CO2 actually looks like.

So it is good news to see the release of ConstructCO2, developed through Evolution-ip, by construction people for construction use.

ConstructCO2 is a simple carbon calculator based on the premise of keeping it simple and easy to use on site. It makes use of existing site approaches for data collection (induction sheets, daily log-ins, plant sheets, utility invoices etc). Carbon emissions through transport are calculated through use of google mapping API .

Construction (people) travel miles are recorded for management, operatives and visitors. (With a dispersed project management team you will be surprised at the carbon footprint of a project site meeting and probably think of alternative arrangements) Material transport miles are derived from delivery notes or goods received sheets.

Where the power of ConstructCO2 lies however is in its reporting. Construction carbons can be measured in terms of co2/£project value, co2/dwelling, c02/m2, co2/bed or other, enabling benchmarking with other projects and generically through KPI’s such as those from Construction Excellence.

But simply knowing the project footprint, the construction company’s total project footprint, and where the biggest areas for carbon emission are enables action for real improvement.

ConstructCO2 is currently being used by a number of different projects in what I guess would be called a beta stage. Current projects include a large new build hotel project, a small industrial refurb project, school extension and an architect’s office.

Currently the use of ConstructCO2 as a tool is free, with a (currently optional) fee based support and training package to help contractors understand carbon issues, carbon standards requirements, measuring, benchmarking and improving carbon footprints.  So it makes sense to take the opportunity now, measure and understand the carbon footprint of one of your projects. At the moment sign up is through request via email contacts on the ConstructCO2 front page

Future developments include the option for live energy feeds from site power meters to ConstructCO2 and live exporting from ConstructCO2 to Google and Pachube for example.

ConstructCO2 is on twitter at @constructco2 and has a ning forum in development for discussion and benchmarking of project carbon issues.

Note: As an associate with Evolution-ip, I have been involved in the ConstructCO2 concept development and testing.  Evolution-IP is a be2camp partner, presenting at and sponsoring be2camp un-conference events.

If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question?

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If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question

Is it ‘just because’ I am currently  seeing things from a different perspective as I re-read Cradle to Cradle, (which I feel  has more resonance with where we are now)  but a number of recent issues and events  have left me questioning our approach to zero, and that going to zero is not enough.   Indeed it may even be dangerous ‘just’ going to zero.

Lets consider the built environment in its widest sense, not just from design to FM but from wining raw materials through construction to end users, and consider the opening premise from Cradle to Cradle, and ask who today would allow a sector to :

Put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air water and ground every year

Produces materials so dangerous they require constant vigilance by future generations

Results in gigantic volume of waste

Puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet

Requires thousands of complex regulations – not to keep people and nature safe, but to keep them from being poisoned too quickly

Measures productivity based on how few people are working?

Creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burning or burying them

Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices.

McDonough and Braunghart were referring to the industrial revolution in these ‘consequences’, but they do describe the construction sector oh so well.  OK so no-one today would allow such a sector which exhibited these ‘by- products’ a licence to trade, so why then do we allow the ‘built environment’ to continue doing so but at a reduced rate?  As McDonough and Braunghart comment – doing only a little good may well be doing no good.

Indeed Janis Birkeland comments in her argument for Positive Development – if we build all new buildings to the highest, greenest standards, then the net contribution to carbon reductions would be only 0.04%.

And with this in mind, the questions that kept forming last week included:

How much do we spend within the global built environment on waste management, (disposal, recycling, regulation, etc) in comparison to the amount spent on eliminating waste full stop, through for example cradle-to-cradle paradigm thinking?

A rule of thumb is that the built environment uses 40% materials, creates 40% waste and generates 40% emissions. Ed Mazria from Architecture 2030 puts this figure higher at 48.5%.  We need to monitor and watch these figures reduce, but at the moment the production of cement remains responsible for about 7% of all carbon dioxide emissions.  Am I the only one who feels guilty with these?

Indeed another rule of thumb puts the quarrying sector at a third contribution – but what proportion from this sector is used to derive materials for construction? If the Cradle to Cradle authors are correct then the consumer (end user) only deals with 5% of the total waste of a product, the remainder 95% is waste created in manufacture.

So why are zero carbon definitions largely ignoring embodied energy and putting them in the ‘too difficult to deal with box’ ?  Dealing only or mainly with a carbon zero definition for buildings in use?

Passivhaus is emerging as the aspirational darling or solution. But what is the true embodied energy of passivhaus, in particular the massive amounts of insulation, sheeting and duct tape?  Passivhaus will reduce energy requirements and costs. Excellent. But I would love to see the payback time on the total and higher than normal embodied energies and waste.

Why are plastic, polyurethane and uvpc now considered green (such products now abound at eco exhibitions and within green guides) based it would seem solely on their performance, not on the harm done during production.

Why doesn’t BREEAM and LEED make more of a  focus on embodied energy  in its scoring?

Oh and why isn’t responsible sourcing to BS6000 more widely known or enforced?

Are we trying to solve the built environment environmental problems with the same mode of thinking that created them in the first place? I have always accepted that within sustainability we will make mistakes, take dead ends and end up in cul de sacs, and that this is all part of the learning and moving forward. But is time running our too quickly, to be so ‘narrow’ and we are just storing another problem for future generations to deal with?

Are we looking down the telescope the wrong way?  Turn it around and we may see the scale and maybe solutions to our problems.

We are in a period of developing strategies, codes and defining zero carbon itself.  Now is the time for that debate to be wider, for a collaborative debate across the sectors that make up the built environment, from raw materials to end users. And here  is where I mention be2camp, as it is through web technologies (in both the widest and most specific aspects) that will allow and enable such debate and dialogue to take place.

And as the Cradle-to-Cradle sub heading says – its time to remake the way we make things

(This is a rewitten and shortened and hopefully bettered reasoned version of the rant I started at the end of last week)

sustainability now champion

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Phil Clarke at Building Mag @zerochamp has asked me to be a  champion for the forthcoming Building magazine’s Sustainability Now virtual event taking place 13 and 14 May.

Still awaiting details, but I will be online in the discussion lounge on the 14th May and look forward to chatting with you there (and hopefuly drinking virtual champagne with Mel and others?) 

 

I will be in great company with fellow green bloggers:

  • Lucy Pedler, an architect founder of the influential body The Green Register, which has a membership of 600 influential sustainable professionals
  • Principal at green consultancy Inbuilt and green blogger Mel Starrs, who writes at Elemental
  • One of the sector’s most popular figures on Twitter, blogger Su Butcher – a practice manager at architect Barefoot & Gilles who blogs at Just Practising.

A detailed agenda for the event should be available next week. In the meantime here’s a bit of a snapshot of the type of content at the show:

  •  Live seminar on refurbishing existing houses with the Energy Saving Trust
  • Discussions on issues such as PassivHaus design, the zero carbon definition and the CRC
  • Videos from Ecobuild 
  • Some content from Bioregional on their views on sustainable legislation and updates from their projects
  • A survey on BREEAM 2008 

More here 

To take part in the online event sign up here  Its Free ! with the benefits you’d get from major conferences without the travel and from your home / office computer.

on going local – part one

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Mel Starrs over at Elemental has a great and useful article on local resources as seen from the LEED and BREEAM perspectives. Local materials, for local people (or a review of LEED credit MR5.1)  Essential reading for those using these standards and grapling with the concept of local resources.

And yet there is another local resource debate emerging that may well eclipse these standards:

The transition movement approach based on the concepts of peak oil and local resilience necessitates the use of local labour and resources. Rob Hopkins within the Transition Handbook includes building materials as one of the key products, along with food, that can be produced locally.  Re-localisation calls for the production of the means to produce locally – something lost in the cheap transport, cheap oil economies.

A recent presentation from Tom Woolley advocating the use of hempcrete and other cropped based construction products as the  material of the future, paints the picture of the hemp being grown fields local to the new housing project.

Within the UK regeneration projects there is often KPI requirements on the use of local resources and labour, as high as 70%  in an attempt to keep spend local to regenerate the regional and local construction markets.  It remains a key selection criteria on most if not all public procurement PQQ’s.  Corporate organisations often have grand CSR statements on positive approaches to using local labour and organisations. 

And yet a simple plotting of supplier / subcontractor locations on a google map can reveal to clients the visual distribution of spend away from the local area. 

Re-localisation is a debate that will continue, driven by the drive for low or zero carbon, the economy, politics and concepts such as transition and peak oil.  How the standards, LEED /BRREAM and the CSB / CSH influence or reflect this will be of great interest.

… off now to view the Hanham Hall sublitted application plans for their intentions for use of local labour and resources … part 2 to follow.

fishing for BREEAM

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So I hear that BREEAM is to be pronounced as in the fish not as some 1950’s airline (BREE-AM). When did this happen – and is it a clever piece of viral marketing to give BREEAM a lift?

BREAM is never far from discussion in the work that I do, and over the last two weeks has cropped up as usual, but its mention has raised a number of worrying thoughts in my mind.

Firstly on a workshop, discussing the need for BREEAM on a new project, the comments, how “we know all about BREEAM, just means we will have more cycle sheds” “nothing to do with us its a design thing”.  And there was the genuine perception that nothing different need be done.

Secondly, I have talked or communicated with three people, all UK based, who are taking the LEED assssor course. The reason, mentioned by all was that their clients are starting to look at LEED as an alternative to BREEAM . This led, on one occasion to a discussion between the two, with the conclusion that LEED postively encourages innovation more so than BREEAM and encourages or enables more collaboartively working across the project teams to acheive the standard.

A while ago I posted an item cracking the codes relating to the USA Architecture 2030 movement which undertook a study of all the USA based codes in relation to achieving the 2030 objectives, and highlighting the gaps – the codes or standards didnt quite go far enough.

I would love to see a similar mapping exercise in the UK – a gap analysis betwen all of our codes (and I would include BRREAM, Regs, Considerate Contractors etc ) against the objectives set for the sector – (CSH, Construction Strategy, proposed Code for Sustainble Non-Doms etc).

Related posts:

on the future of sustainability standards

out breeam’d ?

on the future of sustainability standards

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Last nights Lancashire Built Environment’s Pecha Kucha evening exploring the theme of affordability or sustainability mentioned the sustainability standards and codes more than once.  Listening to the other presentations brought back two items which I feel need much more publicity.

Firstly Phil Clark‘s (Zerochampion) Will There Be One Global Green Building Standard to Rule Them All? article which was carried on Jetson Green recently discussing the possibility of one global standard.  Is it already shaping up for world dominance of LEED (possible) or BREEAM (unlikely) or something similar (possible)?

Secondly Pam Broviaks pecha kucha presentation Greening the Globe to be2camp2008 last month. The presentations can be viewed here) Fittingly, delivered over the web (from Illinois into London) Pam’s presentation gives one of the most concise overviews of the many global sustainability or environmental standards out there.  Essential viewing to understand what is happening, and how all that best practice must surely start to come together into the global standard.

facilities management of green buildings

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I like this, and wonder if there are any other facilities management courses that focus on managing buildings that are green, LEED or BREEAM accredited? After all its all in the management of the building and facilities not just the design and the tick in the box.

(INDIANAPOLIS) The Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) will offer a unique course beginning in the fall of 2008 entitled “Greening Organizations.”

The masters-level course will introduce students to the requirements needed for existing buildings to become LEED Certified by the United States Green Building Council. The course will also cover other rating systems and the management of green buildings.

“Because LEED Certified buildings conserve energy and water, reduce waste, and have lower operating costs, creating and sustaining LEED Certified buildings is a trend that is here to stay. It is important for our students to receive a solid foundation in this area of study,” said Ken Rennels, associate professor of mechanical engineering technology and facilities management program director at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI.

The “Greening Organizations” course is offered as part of the School’s recently launched online Master of Science degree emphasizing Facilities Management. The program is delivered via the Internet to meet the needs of working professionals, preparing students to meet a growing demand for skilled employees in the Facilities Management field.

LEED for Neighborhood Development

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LEED (the US version of BREEAM) is piloting a LEED ND – a neighbourhood development assessment system. The FAQ refers to it as a rating system that integrates the principles, of smart growth, new urbanism, and green building into the first national standard for neighborhood design

Details are available from the LEED website – but looking at the assessment checklist it looks very familiar to our sustainable communities and community based facilities management approaches.

I have just been reading the very informative paper The Law of Green Building from US Law Attorney Stoel Rives LLP, which has a useful chapter on LEED ND. – LAW OF BUILDING GREEN – Community and Neighborhood Development

Do we have a BREEAM equivalent? (not to my knowledge – but if any more experience BREEAM people out there know better then please post below)