Elemental

These are my links for April 21st through April 27th:

• NGS GreenSpec – Materials – Embodied energy – Data on embodied energy is notoriously difficult to find. This is a useful source: "The figures included in the following table are a much-shortened and abbreviated adaptation of a survey published by the Sustainable Energy Research Team (SERT) of the University of Bath. The survey, ‘Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE)’ V1.6a, was compiled and written by Prof. Geoff Hammond & Craig Jones, 2008. The full detailed survey, complete with original data, methodology and notes, is availablefrom www.bath.ac.uk/mech-eng/sert/embodied/
  The figures are based on a ‘Cradle-to-Gate’ analysis of publicly available information."
• BSD launches wiki site – Building Sustainable Design – "The BSD Project wiki allows you to upload details of projects, images and design team information to our project database.
  You don’t have to know every last detail about a particular project, just log in and fill in the bits you do know then encourage other members of the project team to upload information on the aspects of a scheme for which they were responsible.
  Like Wikipedia, the BSD site is a database open to everyone, to contribute or scrutinize and over time we hope the wiki will grow into a valuable resource of contemporary project design."
• ACE – CFLs won’t save much energy if they stay in the kitchen drawer – Andrew Warren on all those unsolicited lightbulbs. Not only unsolicited, but often packaged in boxes too big to go throught the letterbox, requiring an extra car trip to the post depot. *sigh*
  "Since 2002, the energy companies have distributed 262m light bulbs. That amounts to an average of over eleven CFLs for every single household in Britain. Nonetheless I keep meeting people who have never received any such largess. Bearing in mind the large number of studio and single-bedroom flats around, with far fewer than eleven light sources, that ought to mean that some households must have got at least a couple of dozen.
  Are they all installed? Amazingly, nobody seems to know. There is no requirement for anybody to keep tally on which addresses these 262m bulbs have gone to, let alone to establish whether they are being put to use. If ever there was a need for a sample survey of existing homes, this must surely be it."
• Recovery soon for construction? (Brickonomics) – "Clearly the wider economy as measured by GDP has a major impact on construction output, but the link is neither linear nor direct. … construction is a series of mini-industries with growth cycles that are out of phase.
  When you aggregate the various cycles of construction together the effect is to elongate the overall response rate to outside signals….. So while housing is moving up, commercial may well still be moving down before rising later.
  The pattern is further muddled by the heavy influence of public spending, which accounts for about a third of all work. This can operate counter-cyclical to the private sector, dulling the up and down movement and reshaping the V towards a U.
  And it is this spending that currently poses the most concerns regarding the shape of the construction recovery.
  There is a real risk that public spending on construction will take an L-shaped path in the near future as the Treasury seeks to balance its books."
• James Randerson: To stop a climate catastrophe we must first believe we can make a difference | Environment | guardian.co.uk – "Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction."
• scottberkun.com » Where do your ideas die? (With a bad illustration) – This sounds familiar (from my days back in large engineering consultancies): "Executives often do this flinchy sort of thing and it’s big news at many corporations to start “idea programs” to encourage people to submit ideas. These programs are launched, ideas are submitted, and there is much rejoicing. But little change.
  The reason there is little change is that idea inputs were never the problem. The bottleneck was further upstream. Crowdsourcing, brainstorming, mindmapping, and the dozens of other techniques people obsess about help create early idea volume, but do little to help the curators, the people who winnow down the hundreds of ideas down to dozens, and dozens down to a handful.
  It’s much more useful to study where the bottlenecks are, when and why new ideas are killed, and who the people are that are killing them."

admin News berkun, building_services, climatechange, construction_industry, crowdsourcing, Economics, embodied, Energy, green, ideas, innovation, lightbulbs, Management, materials, products, Projects, recession, strategy, UK, wiki

Phil Clark, Building magazine’s editor-in-chief of digital communities, (loving that job title!) has kindly asked me to be a sustainability champion at Building magazine’s Sustainability Now – a virtual event taking place 13 and 14 May. I’m not quite sure what this entails – I hoping for virtual champagne in the VIP lounge.

I took part last year but didn’t blog the event (seem to remember it was in the first or second week of July). There was some great conversations in the lounge (Phil blogged about it here). Given the liveliness of last year, perhaps champions will be virtual bouncers, throwing out trolls and watching out for flaming? Anyway, I’m looking forward to participating and have added a button at the side and above which should send you through to registration.

Content promises to include discussions on issues such as Passiv design, the zero carbon definition and the CRC.

Sign up now before you forget, and I’ll remind you all closer to the time too…

admin Events conference, event, sustainability now, virtual

These are my links for April 16th through April 20th:

• Of Age, Youth and Wisdom – The Regeneration Blog – Of all the new Estates Gazette blogs, I'm enjoying Jackie's the most. Wise words today and a point well made: "regeneration is all about delivering where the market has failed."
• AIArchitect This Week | Face of the AIA: Sustainability: The Legacy of Fitch – "How would Fitch appraise our profession’s embrace of sustainability? He’d caution us against making the same mistake as the Modernists by placing too much emphasis on technological fixes. He’d goad us to study the ways in which vernacular architecture uses native genius to keep buildings in environmental equilibrium. He’d encourage us to pursue preservation, restoration, and adaptive use as tools toward sustainable cities. And he would no doubt chide us in his warm, Southern drawl, “Took you long enough.”"
• EnergyPlus Version 3.1 and OpenStudio v1.0.3 Available « bldgsim – New version of EnergyPlus is released.
• Footprint » London Yields – "On the issue of food security, the exhibition quotes Lord Cameron of Dillington who said that Britain was ‘nine meals away from anarchy’. To illustrate how real the issue is, one wall is dedicated to a food map showing the origins of the contents of a two-person household’s weekly shop (from the ‘every little helps’ supermarket). Each item was described in terms of the country it came from, the resultant miles it had travelled and how much CO2 in kg per pack this equated to in terms of air and sea miles. Out of a 24 strong list, only 8 items were from the UK and products easily produced in the UK such as apples, broccoli and lamb were source from elsewhere."
• Places and infrastructure-Better Buildings Partnership (BBP) Green Lease Toolkit: London Development Agency – "These guidelines are non-prescriptive, helping owners and occupiers to agree carbon, energy, waste and water reduction strategies which best fit with the circumstances of individual properties. With this toolkit it is possible for any owner or occupier to positively engage in developing practical ways to effect significant change, with the hope to accelerate the process of making London’s existing commercial properties more sustainable."
• Real Life LEED: The BIG Review: LEED 2009 Reference Guides Released – Great post on the changes to LEED. More thoughts when I get a chance to read and digest.

admin News 2009, architect, blogs, building, carbon, commercial, estate, food, freeware, green, leases, LEED, real, regeneration, security, Software, Sustainability, UK

I’ve been on a bit of a nature/biodiversity tip recently. Here’s a great list of reasons why trees should be included in urban design – some common sense, some more unusual – from the Forestry Commission’s London Region Trees and Design Action Group report “No Trees, No Future” Trees in the Urban Realm.

Environmental

• Reduce localised temperature extremes (The Urban Heat Island)
• Provide shade, making streets and buildings cooler in summer
• Help to improve air quality by reducing dust and particulates
• Improve environmental performance of buildings
• Help to reduce traffic noise, absorbing and deflecting sound
• Help to reduce local wind speeds
• Increase biodiversity and provide food and shelter for wildlife
• Assist in land remediation
• Reduce the effects of flash flooding by rainfall interception

Social

• Improve the quality and perception of the urban environment
• Create community focal points and landmark links
• Create sense of place and local identity
• Benefit communities socially by instilling higher public esteem and pride for an area
• Positive impact on both physical and mental health and well being
• Positive impact on crime reduction
• Improve health in the urban population

Economic

• Have the potential to increase residential and commercial property values by between 7% to 15%
• Improve the environmental performance of buildings and therefore the economic performance through reducing heating and cooling costs
• Can provide mature landscapes that confer a premium for development sites
• Assist the appreciation of property values proportionate to their scale as they grow larger
• Creating a positive perception for prospective purchasers of property
• Enhance the prospects of securing planning permission
• Improve health in the urban population, thus reducing healthcare costs
• Provide a potential long term renewable energy resource

For all the references, and loads of guidance download the 60 page pdf (including case studies) here. And it looks like the guidance could be taken on by DCLG in the future, so worth getting to know.

The one which really jumped out as being counterintuitive to me was the “Positive impact on crime reduction”. Surely thieves can hide behind trees?

Turns out studies (pdf, 25 pages) report: “Residents living in “greener” surroundings report lower levels of fear, fewer incivilities, and less aggressive and violent behavior”.

Fascinating. Turns out dense vegetation causes fear of crime, rather than crime itself.

hat-tip to Hattie Harman for alerting me to the report in her excellent Footprint blog over at AJ.

admin Psychology benefits, crime, economic, environmental, fear, Social, trees, urban

Well, slightly belated as 11 April 2009 was the 3rd birthday of this blog, but I figure people have better things to do with their bank holidays than read this blog.

Last year I jotted down some stats, so for this following along at home, I’ll give some quick updates.

My hits have increased almost 50% from almost 8000 last year to nearly 12,000. Which is incredible, really. I once heard a rule of thumb, that it took 3 years for a blog to become established. Seems that’s held up for me at least. So for anyone else who is struggling, and wondering if it’s worth it, keep going, it all comes together eventually.

By far, my most popular post has been June’s Rough Guide to BREEAM 2008, which to date has been viewed a staggering 1,482 times. I’m stunned.

I’m in the process of clearing up links, categories and tags, reviewing old posts, clearing out old drafts and general spring cleaning. I’m hoping to follow up on some of my old posts and tie up some loose ends in the next few months. But no promises. Looking over old posts, I have a very poor habit of promising to write something and then not following it up, as the next, more exciting, shiny thing comes my way. So, if I do it, I do it. If I don’t, c’est la vie!

Again, thanks to everyone who has read, commented, twittered or sent me emails in the past year, especially those who let me know when when my site was broken (which it was for a considerable chunk during the winter).

admin Housekeeping analytics, birthday, Blogging, statistics

These are my links for April 7th through April 9th:

• Insulation is king – part 2 – "When NOT to insulate
  Some properties, typically built before 1940, have no vertical damp proof course (VDPC) around the windows. They rely on the ventilation in the cavity to stop rainwater penetrating to the inside wall. In this case you will need to either insert a VDPC or not fill the cavity.
  In any house, cavity wall insulation will reduce ventilation, preventing natural moisture build-up from being removed. So if you have cavity wall insulation make sure you also have trickle vents or extract fans."
• Interior Design Trends – Garden Landscaping Ideas – Beautiful Homes | Maryland – Northern Virginia – Washington, DC – Passivhaus – Always interesting to see reactions to Passivhaus (more desirable than LEED?):
  "The thought of a home so efficient that it doesnt need a HVAC system is quite intriguing, and for some, more desirable than a LEED cert. The PeakOiler's will love it. Of course, our HVAC contractor might not like the concept too much, but hey, there's still ductwork to run and an ERV to take care of. …
  Another one of my concerns is that the home is that the home I've seen are necessarily boxy and without much exterior detail. According to Katrin Klingenberg, an architect who built one of these in Champagne Urbana, IL, "The surface/volume ration has to be very good… you do not want to have a lot of nooks sticking out of your house… because you lose energy". This runs counter to our typical bungalow designs that are quite high on the nook and cranny ratio."
• Forestry Commission – The Trees and Design Action Group – via Hatty at the AJ Footprint blog (an excellent blog, BTW), "No trees, no future" report from Forestry commission.
• Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: the Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy – Boing Boing – Great review from Cory of David McKay's Without Hot Air. I think I'm going to have to cave and buy on paper – I've not opened the electronic version I downloaded months ago and this review really makes me want to read it.
• Reinventing America’s Cities – The Time Is Now – NYTimes.com – "With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.
  Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.
  Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities."

admin News architects, biodiversity, books, cavity, cities, climate, ecology, Economics, globalwarming, insulate, passivhaus, planning, reference, refurbishment, retrofit, Sustainability, trees, urban

So the fuzzy image to the left is from left to right: James Lovelock (89), Micheal Meacher (69) and Crispin Tickell (78), with the chairman whose name I didn’t catch.

I had the opportunity to see these three wise men speak at a Nature magazine sponsored talk at Kings Place, London on 9 March 2009.

The title of the talk was “What price biodiversity” but given the current economic climate, a lot of the talk was given over to the mess we have got ourselves in. In fact, the similarity between economic models and climate models was noted by Lovelock.

The average age of the speakers was almost 79 and at this stage in their careers, they weren’t pussy footing around and were ready to speak their mind!

I took copious notes from the debate, some of which I’ll give below. I’ve tried to attribute the quotes and thoughts to the correct party – apologies if I got any of it wrong:

Lovelock

Ecosystems are not here to service us humans. This attitude is comparable to slavery and just as reprehensible.

Biodiversity is not comprehensible to the man on the street.

Oil will run out in 40 years and this will have an impact on agriculture, leading to mass extinction (on this point the whole panel agreed!)

Tickell

3 factors for change are required:

• leadership from above
• pressure from below
• benign catastrophe

By benign catastrophe, he meant something which visibly and attributably goes wrong.

Mentioned alternate means of measuring wealth eg: instead of GDP, use HDI (Human Development Index). Alerted us to Sarkozy’s challenge to Stiglitz and Sen to come up with a quality of life indicator for France – more on that can be found at NYT here.

Believes population growth is a cultural behaviour rather than an ‘instinct’ and hence can be reprogrammed.

Meacher

Noted that the neo-liberal market view is breaking down and the new world economic order is an enormous opportunity.

Again, he noted the need for some kind of national or international disaster to act as a catalyst for change. The current economic crisis of this magnitude is an opportunity.

The debate was also held on Second Life (which I must admit, I haven’t taken to at all – mainly due to my continuing peripetetic life, flitting between PC’s, laptops and locations). Some more coherent notes are available here from Cian O’Donovan who I’ve just started stalking on twitter.

The take home message from the evening was that we’ve sat around talking about this for far too long. Time is running out and mass extinction of the human race (or at least western civilisation as we know it) is very much on the cards.

admin Events biodiversity, Crispin Tickell, debate, Economics, James Lovelock, Kings Place, mass extinction, Michael Meacher, Nature, population

These are my links for March 31st through April 6th:

• Sustainable Design: What Do Europeans Know That We Don’t Know (But Should)?- 3/1/2009 – Building Design & Construction – "The respective roles of regulation and market forces are quite different in Europe from what we expect in the U.S. and Canada. That's one of the fundamental current differences that are likely to converge over the next five years, as the U.S. and Canada face up to the carbon reduction challenge. Generally speaking, in Europe, and especially in the U.K., people expect their governments to regulate, so government incentives for energy-efficient buildings are less prevalent there than they are in the U.S., or even in Canada."
• Top 10 Myths about Sustainability: Scientific American – Fantastic (long) article:
  Myth 1: Nobody knows what sustainability really means.
  Myth 2: Sustainability is all about the environment.
  Myth 3: “Sustainable” is a synonym for “green.”
  Myth 4: It’s all about recycling.
  Myth 5: Sustainability is too expensive.
  Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living.
  Myth 7: Consumer choices and grassroots activism, not government intervention, offer the fastest, most efficient routes to sustainability.
  Myth 8: New technology is always the answer.
  Myth 9: Sustainability is ultimately a population problem.
  Myth 10: Once you understand the concept, living sustainably is a breeze to figure out.
• Visualising sustainability « Computing for Sustainability – An incredible resource – 158 different visualisations of definitions of sustainability. I can't remember who send me this – thanks whoever it was.
• ArchNewsNow – WORDS THAT BUILD: Re-invent Green Communication – Great article from a great series. Can easily substitute BREEAM for LEED and it will read the same: "Your goal is to filter the enormous written text of LEED and deliver the gist of relevant LEED issues into commonplace and yet engaging English. This isn’t as quixotic as it might initially sound. The advantage of LEED language over odious “GREENSPEAK’ or “ECOMARKETBABBLE” is that it traffics in concrete specifics within building systems. The downside of LEED language is that it borders on “official” bureaucrat-ese,” the palaver of numbed technocrats."
• House 2.0: Why sash windows work – "in a critical passage in Part F, the ventilation regulations, there is a reference that says that, when replacing windows, rapid ventilation should not be made worse. Up until now, no one has challenged the assumption that this simply means that the openings should be of similar size. But it transpires that a single opening casement is far less effective at rapid ventilation than a combination of top and bottom openings."
• Sustainability in practice: Carbon profiling | Design details | Architects Journal – "Sturgis carries out carbon profiling using a bespoke software program that measures the embodied carbon of a building over its lifetime to ascertain its whole-life carbon footprint. Part L requires a calculation of operational energy-use, the Building Emission Rate (BER), which is calculated in kgCO2/m2/year. Carbon profiling uses these same units to measure Embodied Carbon Efficiency (ECE), including allowances for the demolition and transport associated with the building. The total annual carbon cost of a building is the sum of the BER (operational energy) and the ECE (embodied energy).
  Each component of a building is analysed. For example, an aluminium panel and glass cladding system can be compared with a concrete panel and glass cladding system. The concrete system uses about 20 per cent less carbon to construct than the aluminium and will last approximately two to three times longer. Therefore, the ‘carbon cost’ over time is significantly less for concrete than for aluminium."
• Should aesthetics be part of BREEAM? | Zerochampion – Guest post from Benjamin Kinch: "no matter how energy and water efficient a building may be, it becomes a waste of resources, a potential detriment to the community and environmentally damaging if no one wants to occupy it."
• Hallmarks of a sustainable city | Publications | CABE – "Hallmarks of a sustainable city sets out the practical and policy responses to climate change that CABE believes are needed to ensure our towns and cities are geniunely sustainable places."

admin News aesthetics, Architecture, article, BREEAM, building, CABE, carbon, cities, climatechange, communications, definition, development, Economics, embodied, Energy, environment, Europe, future, LEED, myths, Part_F, politics, sciam, science, Sustainability, Sustainable, US, visualization, windows

The UKGBC released a report called “Biodiversity and the built environment” on 31 March 2009. The portal was a couple of days late but was available when I checked on 3 April. I would recommend reading the full report (a quick read at 38 pages, mostly appendices). Below, I pull out the pertinent information regarding BREEAM and LEED.

Biodiversity and ecology are the areas I am least qualified to talk about under sustainable buildings, so it’s good to see some more guidance.

The report focuses on new build, rather than existing sites, but most of the advice seems suitable for both scenarios. There is a useful section on page 14 which covers UK Biodiversity Action Plans – the portal has much more information on this:

The UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) has established the framework and criteria for identifying priority species and habitat types for conservation. National priorities and targets are set and action is to be taken at a local level. Today there are over 160 Local Biodiversity Action Plans (LBAPs) in England, Scotland and Wales and LBAPs are currently being set up in Northern Ireland.

The BAP system classifies priority habitats into broader habitat groupings. The most relevant broad category for the construction industry is ‘Towns, Cities and Development’. However, within this category there is currently only one priority habitat, which is ‘Open Mosaic Habitats on Previously Developed Land’ applicable to some brownfield land.

The task group recommends that further additions should be made to the broad ‘Towns, Cities and Development’ category, in order to ensure that features of the built environment are recognised as important in their own right.

The group recommends that features of the built environment that provide vital habitat to species and plants should be recognised for their importance such as living roofs and walls and other biodiversity features. This would recognise industry efforts to provide for building-reliant species in new structures where traditional roosting or nesting places would no longer be present due to the need to employ techniques to reduce carbon emissions from housing, such as swift nesting and bat roosting features incorporated into new housing projects.

Part of the report reviews existing tools, including BREEAM and LEED and assesses the quality of the biodiversity credits within each. From page 11:

Each of these tools incentivises the consideration of biodiversity in new construction, and tools are therefore a significant driver for changing industry practice.

…

In summary, the task group found:

• There is no common approach to assessment of biodiversity across the principal sustainability tools.
• Sustainability tools could be improved to assess biodiversity in a more meaningful way, which better assesses the value of habitats that are gained and lost.
• Improvements could be made to the tools which focus users on making a genuine contribution to local ecological value, rather than unintentionally encouraging a ‘tickbox’ approach.
• Sustainability tools do not encourage the industry to appropriately monitor and therefore meaningfully maintain and manage habitats created through development.

The results of the review of BREEAM and LEED is below:

A comment in Appendix 5 covers some concerns regarding the need for a professional ecologist:

During initial consultations both parties raised strong concerns over the task group’s suggestion that a professional ecologist should be appointed to the project team as a pre-requisite to achieving credit for biodiversity. The inclusion of an ecologist could potentially increase costs and not be a viable option for smaller projects.

Anyone looking at the list of letters after my name can work out I am a fan of professional qualifications. Whilst a small job may be able to ‘get away’ without an ecologist, I would agree that suitably qualified and experienced ecologists should be used on most BREEAM projects. And as I say above, it is the area I am least qualified to do myself.

It is possible to roughly map the land use and ecology credits in BREEAM to LEED in order to compare the two. This covers more than just diodiversity and ecology, with land use intrinsically linked:

The other credit in LEED which indirectly affects biodiversity is SS7.2 Heat Island Effect – Roof which has no BREEAM equivalent. This credit could encourage the use of green roofs, which will have an effect on biodiversity.

As the UKGBC note, LEED does not promote habitat and wildlife as well as BREEAM. I’m not sure why this might be, but I do expect the two schemes to continue to converge in the next few years. Perhaps LEED 3.0 will address this shortcoming.

There are plenty of opportunities to improve biodiversity in new build projects – the portal looks a great resource for finding out how. It also looks as if other topics will be added in the future.

edit: I was clearing out some old drafts when I came across this nugget of information which has relevance to the above: “From 1st October 2006, all public sector bodies, from the police to the BBC, will have to consider biodiversity in the work they do. The new duty comes under Section 40 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act.”

For further details, search on the portal.

admin Accreditation biodiversity, BREEAM, guidance, LEED, UKGBC

Another great short video from TED – this time on plastics in the ocean.

“Only we humans make waste that nature can’t digest”

Charles Moore: Sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

admin Diversions Charles Moore, ocean, plastics, waste