Elemental

What I’ve been reading about:

• 7th Generation Businsses: Ecoprises? « Brightest Green Blog – Recycling provides employment: "The 36x return on employment that waste recycling creates seems to make good business sense on nearly every level."
• McCloud: No chaos at Hab – Building Design – Kev fights his corner, in what seems to be a frenzy kicked up by the media to fill the pages in a slow August. Won't hurt of course that Kev has a new programme out – no such thing as bad publicity and all that. Which makes me wonder about who cooked up the furore in the first place. Cynic, moi?
• Washed away by RIBA’s flood-risk housing design competition (The Foreman) – The Foreman blog over at CJ usually annoys me, rather than entertains (I don't think I'm their target audience), but this brought a smile to my face: "Call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I'm not sure RIBA and Norwich Union's finest have really thought this one through. Surely the best way to make sure a house doesn't disappear under three feet of water every year is to make sure you haven't built your house in a flood-risk area in the first place. On that basis I've got an 'innovative and interesting' device that can be used to mitigate flood risk: it's called a 'hill'. "
• Major Developers Back BREEAM for Central and Eastern Europe – "BRE Global is currently seeking developers who wish to assess their projects across Europe under the scheme during its first pilot year of operation. BRE Global will also be running scheduled training courses in various locations for consultants wishing to train to become BREEAM assessors internationally."
• Plan for anaerobic digesters in every town to recycle leftovers – Times Online – via EST, anaerobic digesters, which seem to be gathering momentum this year. Anyone been to Ludlow?
• What’s stopping us recycling? – The government-funded Waste & Resources Action Plan (WRAP) has carried out research investigating the barriers preventing a further rise in household recycling rates – and offering local authorities advice on overcoming them.
  According to WRAP, these barriers can be broken down into four distinct areas – physical, behavioural, lack of knowledge and attitudes and perceptions.
• Code for Sustainable Homes – lessons learnt – Lessons learnt by the first four developers to design and build to the Code for Sustainable Homes on the BRE Innovation Park have led to the compilation of detailed guidance in a BRE Information paper entitled Applying the Code for Sustainable Homes on the BRE Innovation Park.
  Devised to help UK housebuilders deliver code compliant homes, the guidance is now being published in four-parts covering the following key areas: building fabric, energy and ventilation, water, and architecture, construction and sourcing. Part 1 of the Information Paper, Lessons Learnt About Building Fabric has just been published.
• LEED 2009 now open for second public comment period- 8/19/2008 12:58:00 PM – Building Design & Construction – Interesting how LEED approaches changes to the system: "This product of thousands of hours of volunteer time and deep expertise generously given by representatives from every corner of the building industry resets the bar for green building leadership; the urgency of our mission has challenged the industry to move faster and reach further than ever before."

mel starrs News 2009, anaerobic, behaviour, BRE, BREEAM, CSH, digesters, Economics, employment, funny, Housing, international, Kevin, learned, LEED, lessons, Ludlow, McCloud, recycling, wrap

What I’ve been reading about:

• Reader’s Rant – Building Services Journal – "BREEAM is about environmental damage reduction and not about sustainable development. Yet BREEAM is increasingly interpreted within the construction sector as being a metric for sustainable development. Use of the terms ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ have become misleading because they are hijacked to mean ‘more sustainable’ to one degree or another. In fact, it would be more accurate to call buildings achieving these ratings as BREEAM ‘not as bad as most’ or BREEAM ‘a bit less harmful’."
• IES enters free DEC software market – Building – Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) has developed a free alternative to the Government’s ORCalc Display Energy Certifiacte (DEC) software. The Glaswegian firm is planning on a late-August launch.
  The company said the software allowed users to produce DECs and the attached advisory reports as well as facilitate lodgements.
  Benefits over ORCalc listed by the company include: no restriction on the number of building zones (benchmark categories); user-friendly input Web based access; personal user area to store and manage DEC submissions; and ability to save and move between the different sections of the submission
• Hobbits in a hole – Building Design – My favourite tacky hobbit houses in Oregon are in trouble. I could go and snap one up at a bargain auction price…
• Kevin McCloud’s own ‘grand design’ in chaos – Building Design – Read this article, and especially the comments. As usual when a 'design guru' such as Kevin McHeadintheClouds (or Wayne Hemingway to name another, or indeed Germaine Greer, who isn't even a designer) gets involved in 'real' projects, they get hauled over the coals by those who have considerable more experience and a much more realistic view. Poor Kev.
• Small Scale Wind Energy | Carbon Trust – A new Carbon Trust study into the potential of small-scale wind energy has found that small wind turbines could provide up to 1.5 Terawatt Hours (TWh) per year of electricity (0.4% of total UK electricity consumption) and 0.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) emission savings. This is based on 10% of households installing turbines at costs competitive with grid electricity, which is currently around 12p per kWh.
  The study also indicates that for the UK as a whole, the majority of electricity and carbon savings are available from small turbines in rural areas – four times as much as urban areas irrespective of costs, and considerably more given economic drivers. This is mainly due to wind speeds generally being higher in rural areas. Turbines in some rural locations could provide cheaper electricity than the grid, but it appears that in many urban situations, roof-mounted turbines may not pay back their embedded carbon emissions.
• Expert tells legislators in city the price of oil will drop | NewsOK.com – Todd Buchholz (author of "new ideas from dead economists", former advisor to Bush and technophile predicts:"Oil will peg out two years from now being closer to $50 a barrel, which is still high enough to make those alternative fuels worth pursuing.” He said he wouldn't be surprised if discussions took place two years from now about keeping the price of oil from getting too low so it "doesn't pull the rug out from solar, wind and clean coal technology.”

mel starrs News architects, BREEAM, carbon_trust, DEC, Economics, EPC, hobbit, house, Housing, ies, learned, lessons, oil, Oregon, report, Software, Sustainable_development, wind