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For those who missed the BREEAM awards at Ecobuild last week, I was chuffed to find out that one of the first projects I worked at when I arrived at Inbuilt had won the Prisons category for the BREEAM awards 2010.

The project was a massive learning curve for both myself (having never worked on a prison before) and the construction manager (who had not done BREEAM before – although the contractor overall was well versed with sustainability). It was a great project to work on and fostered some excellent relationships.

If you’d like to read the case study the pdf is downloadable here. Littlehey was assessed under BREEAM for Prisons 2006, and achieved an Excellent rating of 76.23%. Our initial target had been Very Good, but we achieved the excellent with no cost to the client, and only a small uplift to the contractor.

The Inbuilt case study is available here and this is what the construction manager said about the experience:

“Dealing with Inbuilt and their specialist team has been a delight; they would review and recommend design changes and constantly reappraise the facts they were presented with until we were able to raise the challenging MoJ expectation of BREEAM ‘Very Good’ to ‘Excellent’.”
Malcolm Mitton,
Construction Manager, Wates Construction Ltd

There is a lot more to a successful BREEAM assessment than ticking boxes, and sometimes all that blood, sweat and tears get the recognition it deserves! Although it was my name on the certificate, massive thanks to my dedicated colleague T, without whose terrier-like ability to chase down evidence, we would not have succeeded.

admin News BREEAM

These are my links for February 28th from 13:17 to 13:17:

• Cutting the Carbon – Presentations – All the presentations from the Camden Passivhaus conference, including Paul Smyth, Justin Bere, Chot Chong, Liz Reason and Mark Elton.

admin News passivhaus

These are my links for February 22nd through February 23rd:

• House 2.0: Dickon Robinson – "(Dickon Robinson) made some interesting observations about social housing, particularly so as he has been so intimately involved in it at Peabody. He recalled that the original council houses, built in the 20s and 30s, were only available to people who had jobs, and that they were regularly inspected by council officials to see that they were being properly cared for — these selection criteria were relaxed after WW2, when many families had to be rehoused. He then suggested that for some, social housing had become "deeply dis-empowering" because tenure was secure, rents were low and thus it "stopped you having to get up in the morning." He also spoke out against pepper-potting, the current practice of mixing affordable with private housing, the logic being to avoid building ghettos. He thought it hadn't been a great success and that, by and large, people were happier living with neighbours of similar social standing. Interesting thoughts, running counter to the prevailing mainstream"
• two roads to solving the refurb crisis – part 2 « carbon limited – Great post from Casey – read both: "Here are my problems with using the SO to fund retrofit:
  1. It’s unfair – everyone pays, while only a small proportion of households get a retrofit in a given year
  2. It’s inappropriate – you’re asking the big energy companies to transform the energy market when their mission is the diametric opposite
  3. It’s a false market – government loves to let the market solve problems (quite right too!) but the supplier obligation isn’t a market, it’s just regulation. Large energy companies may be motivated to find the least cost option but not where the results would threaten their core business. This includes opening up the energy market to new players.
  PAYS on the other hand only affects those whose houses are refurbed and should keep bills steady rather than increase them. And done correctly, it could create a very large market of small and medium businesses, spawning competition and innovation."
• Living with rats: Stop talking about the knowledge economy. Start building a wisdom economy. – As always, a thought provoking post from Julian Dobson: "The knowledge economy is competitive. The wisdom economy is collaborative. The knowledge economy assumes that if we can know that bit more than others, we will get what they have or keep them from getting what we have. It believes in dog eat dog. The wisdom economy says dogs do better when they hunt in packs. It sees knowledge as something to be shared and built collaboratively. It is highly suspicious of the intellectual property industry and the crowd of litigators and branding experts who hang on its coat-tails. Where the knowledge economy is amoral – your disadvantage is of no concern as long as I am succeeding – the wisdom economy accepts at a profound level that your disadvantage is my problem."
• At last the Tories nail their planning colours to the mast – just in time for Bura@20 ! – The Regeneration Blog – Jackie Sadek comments on the Tory Green Planning paper: "Community engagement is really very hard to get right, particularly in areas of deprivation, and almost impossible in areas where there is wide disparity of household income. It just feels a bit naive; "Planning for Real" was always a little fanciful (almost hippie-like) and there now seems to be some sort of romantic notion that we can become like the people in "Passport to Pimlico".
  Frankly the Cameron claim that Open Source Planning "will mend our broken planning system" is really a very strong one. The claim that "it'll help to build stronger communities and help to mend our broken society too" is eye-wateringly ambitious indeed. The ideologue in me (still alive and kicking) would like to think it's worth giving it a go, but this policy is going to have to be implemented by people who really know what they are doing."
• Argument Against Environmental Benefits of Locally-Grown Food – Not unbiased by any stretch, but some valid arguments: "The report explains that linear travel miles are not indicative of total energy use and therefore not necessarily a valid measure of the environmental impact of moving food over long distances. Instead of total miles traveled, the report states that the energy use per unit of food moved paints a more accurate picture of overall energy use…Shipping eggs across then entire U.S. by tractor-trailer to a grocery retailer is still the most fuel-efficient, eco-friendly option, said the report. This underscores the tremendous efficiency achieved through modern transportation systems and economies of scale. While the report did not examine all food products, it does conclude that “food should be grown where the agricultural resources and capacity are most suited to efficient food production,” rather than close to population centers."
• Introduction : Future Venice – I found Rachel Armstrong via TED talks – this looks intriguing: "It is hoped that, since it is possible to design the metabolism of a protocell, a type of protocell might be engineered to capture carbon dioxide from a solution and turn it into its solid carbonate form to produce “pearls” of solid carbon dioxide. This system would form the basis for a new carbon-fixing building material. Early stage experiments to test this hypothesis are currently being conducted."

admin News co2, Economics, food, Housing, Knowledge, miles, PAYS, planning, protocell, refurbishment, retrofit, SO, UK, wisdom

These are my links for February 12th through February 18th:

• Building4Change : California to make energy and water saving mandatory – CALGREEN's approach, with its mandatory provisions being inspected and verified by local and state building departments and confirmed in a green label, has led to concerns that it confuses building standards and certification. Questions are being asked in the USA about a number of issues, in particular, lack of third-party assessment and the code's potential to reduce adoption of points-based certification routes, notably LEED.
• The Race to be the Greenest Building – Some great case studies: "The Living Building Challenge, run by the Cascadia Green Building Council, is growing in popularity these days. Referred to as one of the most advanced green building rating systems in the world, it's growing, I believe, in part because of its rigor. The Challenge is performance based, which means a project has to perform as modeled for one full year prior to receiving certification."
• Thoughts on the Renewable Heat Incentive – "As it stands, this incentive will cause oil-fired boilers (as a technology) to be abandoned, without any clear justification. Many people with radiator-based central heating systems looking to replace a boiler will be tempted to switch to a heat pump solely because of the incentive, which looks like it's going to worth around £750-£1,000 a year for 18 years. And yet, unless the heat delivery system is changed (which is unlikely because it would be expensive and disruptive), the energy and carbon burned will actually increase, compared to an A rated oil-fired boiler. For this reason, air source heat pumps, in particular, are ill suited to replacing domestic boilers. There seems little logic in incentivising people to install them instead of efficient fossil-fuel boilers."
• House 2.0: 36 hours in Switzerland – Is a supra-national standard possible? "The Swiss have their own energy saving performance standard called Minergie. It comes in various format. Standard Minergie, Minergie P (roughly equivalent to PassivHaus), Minergie P Eco (with other sustainability features like water saving) and Minergie P Eco Plus (with added renewables). Obviously, this system is never going to be of interest to anyone other than the Swiss; it's all rather like the Code for Sustainable Homes in this respect. Yet another reminder as to how good it would be to have a supra-national standard that everyone could understand."

admin News Accreditation, ASHP, CSH, GSHP, ILBI, minergie, passivhaus, RHI

These are my links for February 8th through February 9th:

• David Hicks Consultants Ltd – Industrial Roofing and Cladding Consultants – Hilarious Part L takedown to the tune of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody: "During the course of our duties, we are discovering most buildings do not comply with Part L2 ( non dwellings ) in one form or another. Due to the complexity of Part L2, we are finding very few fully understand its requirements and to such an extent, many are blatantly ignoring it. For this reason alone it makes a mockery of trying to reduce Carbon emissions." Click through for lyrics
• NBS | Sustainability: A short history of sustainable development – "The Brundtland definition has spawned a series of sub-definitions to meet particular sector needs. Typical of these is that used by the practice of Foster and Partners, which defines 'Sustainable design as creating buildings which are energy efficient, healthy, comfortable, flexible in use and designed for long life'. The Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA) defines 'Sustainable construction as the creation and management of healthy buildings based upon resource efficient and ecological principles'."

admin News definition, part_L, Sustainable

These are my links for January 29th through February 3rd:

• Inbuilt gains official status to approve Passivhaus buildings – Inbuilt has been awarded the highly-prized status of Certifying Body for Passivhaus buildings. Passivhaus is a design methodology for ultra low-energy buildings, promoted by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. There are about 12,500 Passivhaus buildings worldwide, the vast majority of them in Germany and Austria, and the approach is rapidly growing in popularity in the UK as developers and designers consider their options to meet the Government's zero carbon targets.
  Inbuilt is now one of a tiny handful of organisations in the UK, and just 20 worldwide, who are accredited by the Passivhaus Institut to offer certification services. Certification provides a robust assessment of a building’s predicted energy use and allows an architect or builder to claim the 'Passivhaus' tag for a building and to market it as meeting the scheme's very precise performance standards. In the UK, only three individual buildings have been formally certificated so far.
• NGS GreenSpec – Opinion – Quality Assured PassivHaus Buildings – Part 1 – Excellent piece on Passivhaus by Mark Siddall of Devereux Architects (despite the mandatory slightly shrill rant against CSH/BREEAM which detracts from the piece, IMO). Covers the quality assurance aspects very well and explains why PHPP needs to be used. First of two articles – read both.
• Factor 4 efficiency illustrated by contemporary economic statistics 20100117_wf – Interesting analysis from Wolfgang Feist on CO2 vs. GNI and life expectancy.
• Zero carbon definition offers a new practical approach – EC Harris comment on zero carbon definition: "The revised cost of complying with the new zero carbon definition will depend on the value attributed to the ‘Allowable Solution’ and also the renewable strategy adopted to deliver the 45-50% renewables.
  However, the fabric efficiencies have been reported as adding between £2,000 -£6,500 per unit and the renewables requirement is likely to add around £15,000 per unit. This results in an additional build cost of £20,000 per unit but represents half the previous £40,000 estimate to deliver the full Code Level 6 definition.
  Astute house builders will therefore see opportunity in the new definition, with commercial advantage gained by selecting sites and design solutions which allow on site renewable costs to be minimised either through connection with district heating or large scale wind coupled with the use of an ESCO. Renewable availability of a site must now be considered in land acquisition and existing land banks reviewed."
• News analysis – Is aid without climate adaptation a waste of time? – The Ecologist – However, some NGOs have been amending an existing emergency relief strategy, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), to integrate climate science into their work. DRR uses past events to help the community become more resilient to them in the future. Integrating climate science in DRR plans involves taking account of future predictions for a given area, such as flooding or sea level rises. ‘DRR enables humanitarian agencies to extend the time horizon and to mitigate rather than just respond,' says Dr. Mike Edwards, climate change programme development officer CAFOD.

admin News adaptation, aid, change, climate, co2, CSH, GNI, passivhaus, statistics, zero_carbon

These are my links for January 23rd through January 26th:

• Not the last straw: Homes made from straw bales make a comeback | MNN – Mother Nature Network – Volunteer labour makes costing straw bale difficult: "Though the materials used for straw bale buildings – straw & plaster – are typically inexpensive, the special knowledge required to design & build these structures usually means that labor costs can be anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than for traditional buildings, though some of that cost is made back through energy efficiency.
  “The construction of these buildings takes a person who’s done tons of training to really understand exactly how to get the material to behave,” says Moore. “It just ends up costing the consumer too much money for the benefit it produces.”
  In addition, straw bales can create extra hassle in terms of coordinating their delivery from local farmers, having a big enough job site to store all the bales and keeping them dry during construction.
  One way that people help keep labor costs down is to throw “bale raising” parties where friends & family members help stack bales and plaster walls."
• Forget Sustainability, It’ s Time to Talk Resilience – "There's a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
  “The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”"
• House 2.0: The Denby Dale Passive House – "Because of all this, the house down the end of Geoff and Kate’s garden has assumed a significance they cannot have dreamt of when they first contacted Bill Butcher. It’s not just a low energy house, it’s a Passive House. And it’s not just a Passive house, it’s an assault craft landing on the beach that is the Code for Sustainable Homes. By 2016, when in theory the Code should kick in fully and all new homes should be “zero carbon”, you would not be allowed to build this house. For a start, it is going to have a gas boiler — not permitted under Code Level 6. And it will have nothing in the way of home-generated electricity (although the Feed-In-Tariff coming on stream later this year may cause Geoff and Kate to reconsider)."
• Archinect : Views : Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture – Gloomy, but worth reading the whole article: "The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.
  That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way."
• Sustainability: Carbon reduction – Building – Everything you need to know about CRC: "So is the financial liability placed on organisations by the CRC significant enough to demonstrate a convincing business case for improving energy performance in existing buildings? Not quite. However, the business case becomes more compelling when energy savings are taken into account as shown in the table below.
  Early investment in more energy efficient systems can reap significant savings in terms of reduced energy costs. The example shows the initial investment paid back in less than four years. If early action is difficult due to the current economic climate, then appropriate investment in time for the capped phase (2013) will also significantly reduce CRC liability and generate substantial energy savings. "

admin News AECB, BIM, CRC, future, passivhaus, recession, resilience, rob_hopkins, straw-bale, Sustainability, TT

These are my links for January 15th from 14:23 to 14:23:

• McDonald’s seeks to cut cows’ methane emissions | Environment | The Observer – The fast food chain, which uses beef from 350,000 cattle a year for its burger meat, is to conduct a three-year study into methane emissions from cattle on 350 farms across Britain. Gas produced by flatulent livestock accounts for 4% of the UK's total carbon emissions. It is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse agent. A study carried out in America in 2006 calculated that producing a single cheeseburger involves the emission of around 3.1kg of carbon dioxide.

admin News agriculture, emissions, environment, food

I’m almost finished writing my final installment on BREEAM vs LEED, but I’ve run out of time to publish it this week.  In the meantime, you may be interested to know that CIBSE have a conference coming up on this very subject on 10th Feb 2010 in Balham. A snip at £225 for members.

Hear from Chris Twinn (Arup), Alfonso Ponce-Alvarez, (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment), Ivan Rodriguez (URS Corp), Esfandiar Burman (ARCADIS), Sean Lockie (Faithful+Gould), Steven Brindle (Waterman Energy & Environment Design), Vincent Murray (IES) and Angus McIntosh (Kings Sturge).

BREEAM and LEED are the two most widely recognised environmental assessment methodologies used in the construction industry today.   Whilst the thrust of the two are similar – i.e. conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions, generally it is not straightforward to compare the two. What might be applicable in one assessment method might not be relevant in another.

How can a project team determine under which methodology their project can achieve the best rating? This conference aims to give you the necessary background and help you make an informed decision about your project.

admin Accreditation, Events Add new tag, BREEAM, LEED

This follow up post is for those who are familiar with BREEAM and have some knowledge of the credit numberings and weightings for both schemes. If you need to refer to the manuals the BREEAM manual can be found here and the LEED manual can be found here.

If you are just looking for an overview, try the first post in this series here.

I start with a brief overview of LEED 2009 scoring and prerequisites.

Then I look at the main differences and significant similarities in LEED 2009 from BREEAM 2008.

I finish with the weightings which are now within LEED – a significant change between v2 and 2009 which brings it much more in line with BREEAM.

LEED 2009

LEED 2009 replaced LEED 2.0 from 27 April 2009. All discussion which follows refers to LEED-NC (new construction). There are small differences for the other schemes.

Unlike BREEAM, LEED is a points rather than percentage system. There are 100 base points, 6 possible Innovation in Design and 4 Regional Priority points.

Prerequisites

LEED introduced prerequisites before BREEAM’s mandatory credits. Prerequisites are mandatory for all ratings.

Sustainable Sites

• SSP1 – Construction Activity Pollution Prevention

Water Efficiency

• WE1 – Water Use Reduction

Energy and Atmosphere

• EAP1 – Fundamental Commissioning of Building Energy Systems
• EAP2 – Minimum Energy Performance
• EAP3 – Fundamental Refrigerant Management

Materials and Resources

• MRP1 – Storage and Collection of Recyclables

Indoor Environmental Quality

• EQP1 – Minimum Indoor Air Quality Performance
• EQP2 – Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) Control

Sustainable Sites

SS1 forbids development on farmland, wetlands and within 50 feet of a water body. BREEAM has no equivalent (but these may be covered elsewhere within UK legislation).

SS2 requires development density calculations which BREEAM does not. There are similarities in the types of services (bank, shops, post office, etc) which the development is rewarded for being near.

SS3 (brownfield development) is considerably easier to achieve than LE2 (contaminated land).

The transport credits in LEED are considerably less onerous than the BREEAM equivalents. For example, a 300,00ft² office building would require 95 cycle spaces under BREEAM, but only 36 under LEED. LEED rewards specific parking for LEV and FEV or for an LEV sharing scheme. There is no current equivalent under BREEAM, but there is the opportunity to propose this as an innovation credit.

SS5.2 promotes a high proportion of open space to encourage biodiversity. There is no BREEAM equivalent.

SS7.1 and 7.2 refer to heat island effect which BREEAM does not cover, although green roofs are rewarded (for different reasons) under LE 4, LE 5, LE 6 and Pol 5.

Water Efficiency

WEP1 looks at water use reduction against a baseline, rather than setting an absolute target like BREEAM.

WE1 looks at irrigation which is included as Wat 6 in some BREEAM schemes, but not currently in BREEAM Offices 2008.

WE2 relates to BREEAM credit Wat 5, recycling, which is again not included in BREEAM Offices 2008.

In BREEAM there are 3 credits which reward specific design solutions or technologies, namely water meters, sanitary supply shut-off and major leak detection. LEED tends not to dictate design solutions, focussing instead on the intention (i.e. water use reduction).

Energy & Atmosphere

EAP2 requires the building to be designed to ASHRAE 90.1. This is more onerous than designing to CIBSE standards and UK Building Regulations, and there is no BREEAM equivalent. However, by designing to this standard, there is no need to specifically require technologies or design solutions, in the same way that BREEAM does. It gives designers more discretion.

EAP3 relates to refrigeration and is covered in the EU by legislation.

EA1 is roughly equivalent to Ene 1. However there are 2 key differences – it is stated in terms of improvement over a baseline in energy, rather than a target carbon amount, and is also stated in terms of COST of energy. This is also the case for EA2 which looks at renewable and is roughly equivalent to Ene 5.

There is a total of 11.85% available for BREEAM Offices 2008 Ene 1 for a zero carbon building (which relates to Building Regulation Part L calculations). The maximum number of points available under LEED is 19 for a 48% improvement on energy performance calculated from Appendix G baseline from ASHRAE 90.1-2007. Points are very roughly equivalent to 0.9%, so a maximum 17% in LEED for a very good low energy building versus almost 12% for a zero carbon building seems better value! The calculations are more onerous for ASHRAE than for Part L.

The other main difference in LEED is that Green Power is rewarded, whereas in BREEAM contracts with green energy suppliers is not rewarded.

Materials & Resources

MRP1 relates to storage for recyclable waste. This is similar to BREEAM but the areas required are much greater – almost double at smaller floor areas and 1.5 times as large at higher floor areas.

LEED generally deals in percentage improvements rather than absolute values. This applies to the reuse of materials too. There are a number of additional credits to BREEAM where items such as rapidly renewable materials, local materials and reuse of interior elements are rewarded.

Rather than focus on an accreditation scheme and chain of paperwork (which Mat 5 in BREEAM now uses), the intentions are stated and it is up to the assessor and design teams discretion to ensure compliance is met.

There is still a focus in both schemes for rewarded recycling rather than reducing waste in the first place.

Indoor Environmental Quality

IEQP1 relates to ASHRAE 62.1. There is no BREEAM equivalent as minimum ventilation rates are covered by Building Regulations.

IEQ1, IEQ2, IEQ3 and IEQ5 are quite sophisticated and beyond any current UK requirements. BREEAM does not reward well designed mechanically ventilated systems. If a building requires mech vent, LEED may well be the better accreditation to go for.

IEQ7.1 requires ability to measure post-occupancy thermal comfort. This is far and beyond BREEAM or CIBSE, but is picked up in BSRIA’s soft landing framework.

IEQ8 covers daylight and is similar in scope but uses a different methodology to BREEAM.

Weightings

Whilst LEED does not convert points into a percentage in the same way that BREEAM does, there was a considerable change in allocation of points per credit between LEED 2.0 and LEED 2009 which means there is now an implicit weighting. As this article points out, the new credit weightings heavily favor urban projects.

Comparing the weightings per credits for LEED 2.0 vs. LEED 2009

admin Accreditation BREEAM, LEED