Elemental

As reported by Building4Change:

A new ISO standard aims to bridge the gap between regional and national environmental assessment methods by providing a common framework for them to be carried out.

ISO 21931-1:2010 highlights the key issues to be assessed at every stage of a construction project, from design through to operation and refurbishment or deconstruction. Each of these stages impact on a building’s environmental performance throughout its lifetime and assessment methods are integral in determining its overall sustainability.

There is a clear requirement in the construction sector for such assessments to not only be accurate but consistent. An internationally agreed framework will help ensure that buildings are constructed as sustainably as possible whilst enabling projects to be benchmarked and progress monitored.

I’ve read it, so you don’t have to. It’s only 38 pages long though, and most of those are taken up by definitions, so perhaps I’m not as civic minded as first appears.

I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to reproduce without infringing copyright law (10% rings a bell? can anyone clarify?), so I’ve kept the clippings to a minimum.

The ability to measure and understand the environmental performance of buildings is essential for communicating their potential environmental impacts and their influence on sustainable development.

However:

This part of ISO 21931 does not set benchmarks or levels of performance relative to environmental impacts and aspects.

The document is more of an umbrella (for Europe) which will provide common language to enable standards (such as BREEAM, HQE and DGNB) to be relatable to each other.

We’ve long debated if we’ll end up with one environmental standard to rule them all, or continue to have local, national schemes relevant to location. Sustainability tends to be context specific, so having localised standards makes sense (and the path BREEAM is following), and this framework ought to make things easier. Indeed this is picked up in section 4.3:

The environmental performance of a building is influenced by the characteristics of the climatic, social, economic and cultural context of the nation, region and site in which the building is located.

Subject to the aims and objectives of the assessment, the environmental performance of a building shall be expressed by absolute values. In addition, relative values may be used alongside the absolute values. Relative values refer to given contexts and should reflect regionally relevant benchmarks, as appropriate

This document is not specifically calling for data measurement to be exactly replicated across different schemes – there are moves afoot to define common carbon metrics which will make this much easier, but that is not the purpose of this document.

Lifecycle impacts are explicitly encouraged:

All life-cycle stages shall be considered in the assessment. When some stages are not considered or are excluded from the assessment, the reasons for such omission or exclusion shall be clearly explained in the methodology documentation. The assessment report shall state which life-cycle stages are included and which life-cycle stages are excluded.

Interestingly, in the list of impacts to be considered by an assessment method, notable by their absence are physical location and context of the building, and transport. This does not sit comfortably with me – I have never quite forgiven CSH for removing the transport credits from EcoHomes. I suspect given this guidance document, the same may happen in BREEAM.

The document, if anything, enables any European country to come up with their own assessment method. There is nothing in there which negates the use of either BREEAM nor LEED (although lifecycle calculations may need to be tightened up somewhat). In fact, both schemes as they currently stand cover more ground than that which this document calls for.

Do you need to read this document? Probably not. It gives a good broad overview of the benefits of environmental assessments, so might be useful for that.

And now you don’t need to read it. Aren’t I good to you all?

admin Book Review BREEAM, Europe, LEED, standardisation

These are my links for October 13th through October 14th:

• Launch of HCA and English Heritage Guidance set to pave way for new approach to masterplanning – Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) – "The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and English Heritage today launched its first joint 'How to' Guide outlining a new development-led approach to masterplanning, which advocates assessing the historic character of a site right at the earliest stages of redevelopment. This is set to transform the way sites are redeveloped.
  The Guide, 'Capitalising on the inherited landscape – an introduction to historic characterisation for masterplanning' is the product of an innovative joint pilot project between the two agencies. This took the established conservation-led Historic Characterisation approach – encouraging the use of specific techniques to identify the distinctive characteristics of a site in order to explain an inherited sense of place and identity – as a starting point – and tested its value at different stages of the development process."
• BREEAM: BREEAM Europe Commercial 2009 – "We are delighted to announce the release of the updated BREEAM Europe Commercial 2009 scheme. After four months of consultation with clients, assessors, experts and technical researchers, the new scheme combines the 2008 versions of BREEAM Europe Offices, Retail and Industrial. Key changes to the Commercial 2009 scheme include:
  * Introduction of minimum standards specific to Europe
  * Introduction of exemplary level requirements specific to Europe. Other types of innovation credits will not be available in Europe at this point in time.
  * Post Construction Stage assessment is now mandatory like in the UK in order to get the final certificate.
  * New shell only approach as in UK BREEAM v3.0 Schemes applicable.
  * The manual is now be freely available for download on the website for anyone to access. "

admin News BREEAM, commercial, EH, Europe, HCA, heritage, masterplanning

These are my links for July 18th through July 19th:

• Crouching Tiger? | Forum For The Future – Excellent article on China. "Government backing for big green ambitions is also in evidence at Tianjin. This industrial port east of Beijing is to be the site of a hugely ambitious new ‘eco-city’, a joint Chinese-Singaporean venture which will shortly enter its first phase with the construction of a 1.5km2-‘eco-business park’. When complete, the city’s 350,000 residents will live in super-efficient buildings clustered in hubs designed to minimise commuting needs, and travel to work by light railway. It’s a lot less ambitious when it comes to energy, however, with only 20% to be sourced from renewables.
  In a country which builds two Manhattan islands’ worth of new floor space every year, there’s an urgent need for such exemplar developments. But Tianjin’s experiment will be watched closely, because such projects in China have often not lived up to expectations. "
• The Lazy Environmentalist: Desertec Industrial Initiative – I don't know how Polly finds the time or energy, but she's got good news for DESERTEC: "The aim is to ensure by 2050 that solar power from the northern Sahara will meet at least 15 percent of European electricity needs and a significant proportion of local electricity demand in the countries of North Africa. The purpose of the newly founded initiative is to clarify the technological issues and create the neccessary political, socio-political and economic foundations and develop a vaible implementation plan within the next three years. The DII is expected to network closely with the scientific community, non-governmental organisations and governement organisations. The DESERTEC Foundation will play a central role in this respect."
• how good is PAYS? « carbon limited – Great explanation from Casey on how PAYS might work (or not). The long and the short of it: "Even at this broad brush level, it’s clear that there will be a significant shortfall here. PAYS will not, single handedly, solve the existing stock problem. Someone else – either government or homeowners – are going to have to stump up and the costs are likely to be high."

admin News africa, China, CSP, desertec, Energy, Europe, existing, PAYS, refurbishment, sahara

These are my links for May 26th through June 1st:

• Concentration Solar Power Module Integrates Into Side And Roof Of Buildings – min-CSP – intriguing but no data in the article to back up the theory: "The system, of which the international patent has already been requested, consists of a stationary lens and a linear absorber plate that concentrates sunlight to generate energy. This concentration system reduces the space that until now was needed with traditional plates, which move around in search of sunlight"
• UK Climate Impacts Programme – Socio-economic scenarios – Getting quite old now (Feb 2001) but sets forward 4 potential scenarios for socio-economic situations against which climate change will play out in the UK :
  1. National Enterprise
  2. Local Stewardship
  3. World Markets
  4. Global Sustainability
  At 140 pages, it's not a quick read, but useful resource.
• A glimpse of the future as 56% of surveyors see workload fall (Brickonomics) – More sound commentary from Brian: "But for all the figures on workload, the two bits of data that will probably reflect most the long-term effects of the recession are those for employment and for profit margins. Both continue to look grim.
  It may sound like a management course cliché but one of the biggest weaknesses of the construction industry is one of its biggest strengths, its flexibility.
  And this weakness is exaggerated by the easy willingness of firms to work at below cost.
  My recollection of the 1990s recession was the less damage was done by falling workloads, which the industry's flexibility can absorb without huge stresses, than was done by winning work below true cost or at unsustainable thin margins."
• Monbiot.com » How Much Should We Leave in the Ground? – I had wondered about this before – good to see George has done the math for me: "Even ignoring all unconventional sources and all other greenhouse gases and taking the most optimistic of the figures in the two Nature papers, we can afford to burn only 61% of known fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity." This would result in a 2ºC rise in temperature. Adaptation, here we come…
• Monbiot.com » Crash Landing – Monbiot being unusually level headed: "we were told by both the airline companies and the Confederation of British Industry that business flights were necessary and non-negotiable: civilisation would collapse if executives weren’t able to fly whenever and wherever they wished. The government repeated this creed, insisting that the UK economy was dependent on the expansion of Heathrow. Now we learn that these are the first expenses to be cut when a contraction begins. Businesses are discovering that there are other means of engaging with people overseas, such as email, video-conferencing and an outlandish new device called the telephone."
• ACE – If we can’t count the buildings, how can we plan cuts in emissions? – There's an elephant in the room, and his name is data: "There is no definitive data showing precisely what the carbon footprint of Europe's buildings is. So we can have no confidence we can identify precisely what percentage of the carbon dioxide emissions by end use comes from space heating as opposed to water heating, lights and appliances as opposed to cooking."
• Why Has Globalization Led to Bigger Cities? – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com – Great article on cities with a slant on India: "The right response to the problems of megacities is not to get misty-eyed about village life, but rather to work to improve the quality of infrastructure in those growing urban areas."
• FT.com | The Undercover Economist | Dear Economist: Can you help me to stop procrastinating? – How to cope with procrastination: "The behavioural economists Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch conducted an instructive study of procrastination with three groups of students at MIT. Each group had to complete three assignments over the course of the 12-week course. The first group had a separate deadline for each paper, after four, eight and 12 weeks. The second group had no intermediate deadlines: all three papers were due at the end of the course. Students in the third group were asked to impose their own deadlines.
  Students with well-spaced deadlines – those in the first group and a subset in the third who had spaced out their deadlines – tended to achieve the highest grades. Students who had assigned themselves no intermediate deadlines, or had been assigned none, fared poorly."
• A new era for public health? « – "Yet one group of very important people now admit they too have neglected the issue. The latest edition of The Lancet – probably the world’s leading medical journal – says health professionals “have barely begun to engage with what should be the focal point for their research, preparedness planning and advocacy”. Now doctors see climate change as “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”.
  The Lancet calls for a “new public health advocacy movement” to usher in an unprecedented era of co-operation between widely divergent spheres such as disease, food, water, sanitation, shelter, settlements, extreme events, population and movement.”"
• Prince fails on sustainability – Building Design – A bit late getting to this one – Amanada takes on Charles: "This is where the speech unravelled for in making out “experimentation” to be a terrifying leap in the dark rather than something good based on hypotheses and a body of knowledge he came across as an intellectual Luddite, whose only solution is to retreat into a Hobbit-like world of organic earthy buildings and no cars."
• Carbon-effective refurbishment – Modern Building Services – Ant Wilson calls for an integrated approach to refurbished buildings: "At the same time, the lower metre could be well insulated and fitted with photovoltaics (PVs) and internally lined with phase-change boards. Emerging concentrated photovoltaic energy generation (CPV has around 1000 times less embedded energy than conventional PVs, and its price is falling rapidly, which will improve the cost-effectiveness of building-integrated PV in coming years."

admin News adaptation, aviation, buildings, cities, climatechange, comment, construction_industry, CPV, CSP, data, Economics, Europe, fossil_fuels, globalisation, gtd, healthcare, hobbit, monbiot, phase_change, Prince_Charles, procrastination, Productivity, PV, recession, refurbishment, scenario, Society, solar, UK

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

These are my links for June 18th through June 19th:

• Mott MacDonald launches Abu Dhabi sustainable programme – Building – Estidama – Mott's BREEAM and LEED competitor, bespoke for Abu Dhabi. Anyone got a copy?
• HDI vs. Eco footprint – Great graphic from WBCSD plotting ecological footprint against human development index. Useful when comparing technologies suitable for different countries.
• France pushes for common standards in green building for Europe « La Vie Verte – Not a very french attitude, given their penchant for inventing new words when perfectly good one's exist already. But good news, nonetheless…
• B******s to Architecture: 207 : Education Bollocks – B2Architecture on top form:I believe that we need a fundamental readjustment in our education system – relinking architecture with the rest of the construction industry so that we can re-establish our position as the Team Leader, not be relegated to the l
• Technical questions – high NOx boilers, sound levels and data centre cooling – Impressive building services related Q&A from BSRIA.

mel starrs News Architecture, blog_entry, BREEAM, BSRIA, building_services, comment, ecological_footprint, Europe, HDI, HQE, LEED

What I’ve been reading about:

• NYREJ – What works there, can work here: “Green” lessons from around the world – Architects and engineers sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture by focusing too intently on individual (certification) programs. Architects should focus on some of the universal themes found to be successful abroad, pull appropriate concepts and apply
• BREEAM goes to Europe – Property Week – BREEAM Retail Europe will be launched in July and reviewed 12 months later. It will initially cover new and refurbished buildings, but will be extended to older shopping centres at a later date.
• Best Green Companies tables – The Times 50 Best Green Companies venture has both a robust methodology to measure environmental performance and a survey of each company’s staff to find out whether the green sheen is more than skin-deep.
• Departmental Energy: 19 May 2008: Written answers (TheyWorkForYou.com) – Want to know what the energy spend in UK prisons was for the past couple of years? TheyWorkForYou has the answer.
• BREEAM raises stakes – Property Week – ‘Outstanding’ will require an 85%-plus score, whereas ‘excellent’ requires 70%. The new category will set minimum requirements for water and energy consumption in developments. Occupiers will also be able to view compulsory post-construction certi
• Free guide to alternatives to uPVC windows – The guide makes the various cases for alternatives, especially timber and goes into the different aspects of each one in terms of environmental impact and energy efficiency. It can be downloaded free from Sustainable Homes website – www.sustainablehomes.c
• Renew or repair existing window units? A best value approach – "decisions of choice based on quality issues as well as capital cost have given rise to problems within the public sector, leading to financial loss for client organisations in instances where they have failed to adhere to statute or regulatory codes requ

mel starrs News awards, BREEAM, decision, domestic, Energy, environmental, Europe, Housing, LEED, making, models, outstanding, prisons, retail, spend, timber, times, UK, uPvc, windows

What caught my eye today, February 15th:

• The High Cost of Low Trust – Stephen Covey on trust in the business place: “With low trust, you get a lot of rules and regulations that take the place of human judgment and creativity”
• Ultimate House Design – Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) redesigns the house – and makes some valid points.
• SaaS – the killer app for CAD? – Good overview on where the world of CAD ought to be heading in the next few years…
• Energy saving most effective in CO2 cutting -report – Squeezing more productivity out of the energy that industries, homes and vehicles burn is the most economical way to stifle rising energy demand and control output of planet-warming gases, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute.
• A standard method for the Whole Life Costing of Sustainable Design – RICS event on 18 March in Glasgow. Interesting topic
• UK-GBC supports Sustainable Building in Practice – A new guide to building sustainable homes was issued this week, which the UK-GBC is pleased to support.This publication provides hands-on, practical advice to developers in the area of new-build residential homes and contains several contributions from UK
• Mexico to build only energy-smart homes in three years – Aggressive plans by Mexico to produce no more traditional build houses within 3 years.
• Energy Efficiency in Buildings: EPBD ? The EU?s buildings platform; Stakeholders want to move on quicker despite the slow start in many Member States – Great article summarising recent events re: EPBD in Brussels. Good stats on where the rest of Europe are up to on implementation.
• Haden Young boss makes shock departure – Building – No sucession plan in place – when the guy had been there 40 years? tut tut.

mel starrs News Brussels, CAD, Energy, energy demand, Energy saving, energy-smart homes, Europe, European Union, Glasgow, Low Trust, McKinsey Global Institute, Mexico, Scott Adams, Stephen Covey, Sustainable Building, United Kingdom

 Turns out, there a word for what I talked about in this post , eating within 100 miles – locavore.

Eating locally sounds like it will be of great environmental and social benefit – but is it? Tim Harford, one of my favorite economist/journalists* weighs in at Forbes.com here and the Free Exchange blog takes up the analysis here. More recently, he defends the scale of the problem we face and why carbon taxing or pricing is the only solution which works – lying as it does somewhere between the nanny state solution at one end of the spectrum telling us in minute detail what we are allowed to do, and the other end where the problem is too big, existential and distant to grasp at all.

 The food debate continues a few weeks later with Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation fame) in the NYT . Again, Free Exchange weigh in with their analysis. This time I tend to disagree with FE and agree with the first commenter. More on the issues of low wage workers in the US can be found in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed and to some extent in Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label, which looks at the UK and Europe. All that said, tomatoes should be grown where it makes best economic sense, in terms of output and carbon, which may well indeed exclude the US.

 At the risk of exposing my laissez-faire libertarian side and coming to blows with the more socialist arguments behind some environmental dogma, on this issue I believe it is possible to promote sustainability without sticking to a locavore diet – which at it’s heart is merely protectionism dressed up in woolly packaging.

 *I am never sure if he (plus Dubner and Levitt, Worstall, etc) are journalists who write about economics, economists who are journalists or economists who are authors and have a journalism gig on the side. As an aside, I recently found a bookshop who categorised Popular Science as “Pop Science” – is this latest slew of economics books “Pop Economics”?

mel starrs Opinion Barbara Ehrenreich, carbon, Economics, Eric Schlosser, Europe, Felicity Lawrence, food, food debate, locavore, nanny state solution, Tim Harford, United Kingdom, United States

I’m not a big fan of Dubai – either of what’s going up or what’s going on. But I do know a few people out there working. I found this via RatandMouse.

An overview of Dubai’s megaprojects including the Palm Islands, Burj Dubai (world’s tallest building), Dubailand (world’s largest theme park), Business Bay and much more!

The video is over an hour long and has a bizarre euro techno soundtrack. I can see the attraction of working out there as these are not the kind of buildings getting built in Europe today.  If you’re a fan of building the biggest, the brashest, or the most ostentatious, it’s heaven but it’s not for me personally (and the soundtrack didn’t help…)

(edit: can’t manage to post the video and get it to work – anyone know an idiot proof plug-in for WP which will let me post from Youtube and Google Video?  I’ve tried Extreme Video, but it’s flummoxed me for tonight – compete brain meltdown….)

mel starrs Uncategorized Architecture, Business Bay, Dubai, Europe, Google, Palm Islands, YouTube