• Welcome to amazonails – Enerything you ever needed to know about straw bale building.
• Footprint » Common carbon language – "The ‘Common Carbon Metric’ will be piloted by the leading green building rating tools and made available to anyone dedicated to promoting the understanding and development of a low-carbon built environment. The real impact of this initiative lies in the detail which has yet to be announced, but it is an indication of the growing consensus about the role the built environment can play in mitigating climate change."
• Publications – News & Publications | BioRegional: solutions for sustainability – via Hattie at AJ, I find that BioRegional are making lots of their reports free. Will be interesting to read the One Planet Communities and compare to BREEAM, LEED and Estidama. Communities (rather than buildings) will be the buzzword for 2010. Unfortunately Pooran Desai's book is not free, but can be ordered from Amazon.
• marklynas.org | Closed because of geoengineering works – Mark Lynas on geo-engineering (something I'm really not comfortable with): "Geoengineering deeply divides scientists and environmentalists. Should we really consider spraying sulphates into the stratosphere, planting artificial trees across deserts or dumping iron filings in the Pacific as legitimate options to cool down our planet? Kruger, whose preferred solution involves spreading billions of tonnes of lime in the oceans (see cquestrate.com), likens the approach to having an airbag in a car: it’s better not to crash, but also sensible to insure against the risk that the worst will happen. Plus, “the time to design an airbag is before you are skidding on ice”."
• Predicted vs. Actual: Closing the Gap – "Marcus Sheffer, chair of LEED’s Energy and Environment Technical Advisory Group (TAG), shared some ideas under consideration for the next update to the rating system slated for 2012. The group is closely looking at LEED’s energy credits so that energy simulations more accurately predict performance. For example, the TAG is looking at ways to encourage modeling earlier and more frequently in the design process. “We need to change the practice of validation modeling at the end of a project,” said Sheffer. “We need more iterative modeling.” "
  Interesting comment after the article – can we *really* predict performance?
• Three older houses to be Passivhaus retrofitted – "An architects practice is being funded by the Technology Strategy Board to undertake design and feasibity studies into a proposed scheme to retrofit three empty houses to Passivhaus standard. The Retrofit for the Future competition is designed to address the challenge laid down by the government's target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050."
• Announcing Living Building Challenge Version 2.0 — ILBI – For those unfamiliar with ILBI, think of it as uber-LEED: "Version 2.0 of the Living Building Challenge expands its focus to local food production, unrestricted access to nature, no gated communities and other equity issues."

• GEO DYNAMICS – How sustainable are heat pumps? -:- Construct Ireland – Great, but long, article on the pros and cons of air source heat pumps. Level of detail is just right, with plenty of graphs and good argument.
• BSRIA review of NG Bailey’s Solais House – Great review of Solais House. I hadn't realised that it was a spec office before, having seen David Frise present it recently. That explains why it's aesthetically…dubious. Despite this constraint, promises to be a great example – although we await the POE results.
• A place for PVC in a sustainable world? | Forum For The Future – Fascinating article on PVC. Still not convinced about the green guide rating of A for PVC windows, but things are getting better: "It’s not the first time that TNS has wrestled with the issue. It originally grappled with the stuff in 2000, when, with the support of the UK Environment Agency, it investigated whether PVC could have any place in a sustainable society. The answer was a cautious ‘yes’ – providing the industry addressed some of its most pressing challenges."
• Sir Nicholas Grimshaw – People – Dwell – Great quote from Grimshaw on sustainability: "You’ve got to do a bit of lateral thinking on these green issues. It’s quite important to be pragmatic. The one thing we have to watch very carefully is polarization"
  Unusual to find a pragmatic architect – consultants and engineers usually much more pragmatic as they don't play the same zero-sum game as architects are forced into.
• Footprint » You should have been at the RIBA tonight… – Intriguing – anyone know anything more on Bill's views?: "Dunster also made a strong plea on behalf of the Code for Sustainable Homes, calling it ‘an enlightened piece of legislation in danger of being dumbed down by the UK-GBC and the ZeroCarbonHub.’"
• News : NDS – From Mandelson's Hinto Engineering Lecture: "Snow didn’t use the term, but he was angling at the idea that Britain was becoming a scientific knowledge economy. This is certainly the case now. We need to understand more clearly than ever the way in which our pure science and applied science underwrite our prosperity, not least so we can strengthen their contribution to economic growth.
  The wider costs of any failure to do this are very high, both for our own economy and society, but also globally. Snow was worried about how a scientifically illiterate society might fail to feed the expanding populations of the developing world. That concern is still very much with us, and to it our society would have to add the massive problem of decarbonsiation and the management of our environmental impact on the planet. "
• Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment » Blog Archive » Never Waste a Good Crisis – Another report added to my 'must read and comment pile': "Government, as a client, needs to understand the enlightened thinking that better and more intelligent designs improve patients’ recovery in hospitals and learning outputs in schools. So, rather than reduce the number of schools and hospitals being built, it must sponsor smarter and more productive solutions and reduce the amount of money wasted on the procurement process. For Government as a policy maker, the challenge is to create an environment that incentivises innovation and speeds up the modernisation process."
• Thoughts on Copenhagen: Nicholas Stern | News | Architects Journal – Good series of interviews from Hattie in the AJ, on COP15, including this one from Nick Stern: "Energy consumed in the construction and operation of buildings is responsible for more than one third of total energy use. According to the fourth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007, the building sector has great potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
  It concluded that the energy consumption of new and existing buildings can be cut between 30 and 50 per cent without significantly increased costs.
  Architects, together with other built environment professionals, have the strategic and technical skills to deliver buildings that both lead to lower emissions and withstand those impacts of climate change that are now inevitable. With existing technologies, these buildings are now affordable. New technologies are constantly being created. What is required is the vision, leadership and commitment to make a low-carbon future reality."
• Thoughts on Copenhagen: Pooran Desai | News | Architects Journal – The run up to COP15 has started, with this snippet the most interesting thing I found in AJ's recent piece, from Pooran Desai: "To achieve effective change, we need elegant solutions and a sensible systems-based approach to zero carbon; for example, recognising electricity as a pooled resource and not unnecessarily converting buildings into power stations. Land use is as critical as carbon emissions."

• The Architect’s Newspaper – Incredibly honest article from Adajye: "My sense of setting up a practice was about working, not business, and about expediting projects, basically out of my bedroom, that came my way, and the opportunities born out of a series of private commissions in the domestic realm.".
• B******s to Architecture: 261 : Fair Trade? – B2A with one of the best OFT summaries this week, worth clicking through and reading the entire piece: "I reckon that the real reason all these reputable contractors got together and arranged cover-price deals was simply to ensure that the lowest tender was at a price that enabled the successful contractor to make just enough profit to stay in business and not get screwed-down to a price that was completely unrealistic. Look at it this way – is any contractor going to willingly let a rival get away with a hugely-inflated tender price which they know they could beat and still make a handsome profit? No, of course they aren't. Cover-pricing is just a way of ensuring that the successful contractor gets the job for a fair price and the others don't lose a fortune in the tendering process."
• The new serendipity? « Scott Berkun – Every piece of software can be turned off. Every email deleted. Every mailing list can be abandoned. The choice to feel committed to things people send you is an insane thought, as you might as well religiously read every piece of junk mail that arrives at your door or spend hours talking to telemarketers. If you feel obligated to do anything you didn’t promise, whose responsible? It’s not the technology’s fault, it’s yours.
• The true costs of congestion « – According to the University of Zurich’s Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, a commuter who travels one hour one way would have to earn 40 per cent more salary to be as fully satisfied with life as a non-commuter.
• Regeneration & Renewal blog: Off target? – "The Government’s target of making all new homes conform to zero-carbon standards by 2016 is effectively unattainable. This is the view of the Audit Commission’s chair, Michael Higgins, who told this magazine that it will be “all but impossible” to meet the goal. His comments came in the wake of a report published by the public services watchdog on housing, in which it largely blames the absence of an agreed definition of "zero-carbon"."
• Global aviation emissions must be capped to tackle climate change – 9 September 2009 – Enough? :"The CCC’s Chief Executive David Kennedy said: “It is vital that an agreement capping global aviation emissions is part of a Copenhagen deal. We are calling for a cap that would not require people to fly less than today, but would constrain aviation emissions growth going forward. Such a cap together with deep emissions cuts in other sectors would limit the risk of dangerous climate change and the very damaging consequences for people here and in other countries that this would have”."
• Statistics and industry information – The Concrete Centre – Looking for information on the sustainability of concrete?: "The following links will provide you with an insight into the sustainability performance of the different industries and materials that make up concrete."
• Top 100 2009: full table unveiled – 08/09/2009 – Contract Journal – More doom: "Based on industry forecasts, the chances are, put crudely, that there will be about 25% to 30% drop in the cash coming into the industry as a result of the combination of reduced workloads and reduced prices. If that is so, on average construction firms will have to cut output by about 25%.
  But it will not happen that way. The pain will not be spread evenly. Many firms will go bust and a few will grow, if only as a result of consolidation."
• Which comes first; the social media strategy, or the social media tactics? – The Viral Garden – "Once you know what your strategy is, then you can talk tactics. Because each tool works in a slightly different way, and as such, makes it more or less likely to work for your particular strategy. If you want to connect with your customers quickly, as in a crisis situation, or to provide customer service, a tool that facilitates more real-time communication, like Twitter, would probably work well. If you want to establish your expertise within your industry, maybe a blog would be your best bet."

• 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."

I suspect if you were in the north of Scotland this would extend to mainly the sea. Bladderwrack huts, anyone?

BTW, I used this handy website to create the image.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition to the 100 mile diet which is obviously much more onerous. I’ve toyed with the idea of a 100 mile diet before, but given the massive centralised distribution infrastructure of food in the UK (Abel and Cole are as much affected as Tesco, so just because it’s organic doesn’t mean it hasn’t been driven half way round the UK), it’s very difficult to implement. The definition of local food varies in the UK:

Sustain (The Alliance For Better Food and Farming) offers the following definitions for local food:

• produced within 30 miles of the point of sale (PoS)
• produced within 50 miles of PoS
• in towns and small cities produced within 50 miles of PoS
• for large cities produced within 70 miles of POS
• produced in the county.

Enough of food, back to materials. The intent of the LEED credit is: “to increase demand for building materials and products that are extracted and manufactured within the region, thereby supporting the use of indigenous resources and reducing the environmental impacts resulting from transportation.”

So, is this desirable, possible or feasible for the UK? What is the equivalent measure in BREEAM?

Local materials is something which pops up in a number of manifestos, including BioRegional’s One Planet Living (#4 Local and Sustainable Materials – Destructive resources exploitation (eg in construction and manufacturing) increases environmental damage and reduces benefits to local community).  The topic is expanded further here:

The embodied energy, durability, toxicity and ecological footpring of materials should be a standard construction consideration, going beyond the UK Government’s current understanding of “zero carbon homes”, which only includes post-build emissions.

Thirty percent of road freight in the UK carries building materials across the country for no good reason. Government building projects should follow local sourcing policies, and local authorities should provide similar policies to developers in pre-application planning discussions. Local and regional reclamation strategies are an easy way for government to promote the use of sustainable materials.

Governments should also make sure they only use the best available materials on their own projects, both as a matter of principle, for example by only using FSC cerified timber, and in some cases to help develop nascent markets such as in limecrete. Set minimum reclaimed materials content for planning briefs or include reclaimed materials in the government procurement system.

There is obviously a lot more here than just using “local” materials – “best available materials” could be interpreted in a number of ways, and cost is an issue which isn’t factored in.

So what does BREEAM say about “local”? Part of MAN 3 Construction Site Impacts asks for transport movements of materials to be recorded, however, there is no targets or limits set:

BREEAM does not set targets, as these are very project specific. For guidance on setting targets, refer to DTI’s Construction Industry KPI Pack; this series of documents guides the reader through setting targets for their own projects.

The next credit to look at is the sometimes controversial Mat 1 Materials specification which references the Green Guide (which has had a certain amount of flack since launching the new version last year). This methodology includes for some (but not all) transport impacts. From the methodology (pdf, 71 pages):

6.7
Transport
6.7.1
Transport to factory gate
For transport of materials to the factory, data is obtained from the manufacturers for the distance travelled, mode of transport (e.g. sea, rail, and road), vehicle or ship type and average loads or number of deliveries and return load. If data is not provided, then BRE will use default data provided by the Department for Transport from the continuing Survey of Roads Goods Transport.
6.7.2
Transport from factory to site
Manufacturers are asked to provide data on the typical methods of transport of the product to the site. This includes distance travelled, vehicle type and average load and return load if any. In the absence of this information, then BRE will use default data described in 6.7.1.
6.7.3
Calculating inventory data for transport
6.7.3.1
Road transport excluding municipal waste collection, tractor and trailer and Van < 3.5 tonnes
For road transport, the overall distance and tonnes km travelled by each vehicle type is calculated based on the average number of deliveries. Fuel consumption is calculated based on direct fuel consumption figures obtained from UK DfT Road Freight Statistics 2005 and the overall distance travelled.
Infrastructure for road transport including road building and maintenance, lorry and tyre maintenance and replacement is not included within the Environmental Profiles.
6.7.3.2
Rail, water and air transport and municipal waste collection, tractor and trailer and van < 3.5 tonnes
For rail and ship transport, the overall tonnes km travelled by each transport type is calculated.
Ecoinvent models for the infrastructure and energy associated with transport are then used based on the total tonnes km travelled by each mode of transport.
Rail transport is assumed to be a mix of electric and diesel, based on a European average.
Infrastructure for rail, water and air transport is not included within the Environmental Profiles.

Now reading this (and I could be wrong and will happily stand corrected) neither air freight nor shipping of building materials is counted in the Green Guide.  The impact of this may be minimal – but if materials are shipped from say, China, the environmental profile may work out better than locally produced but road transported materials. Odd. Correction: I *was* reading this wrong – shipping and rail is included, but the environmental cost of building and maintaining roads, rail and shipping is not. Air travel is another issue, but I’m not aware of many building materials shipping in planes.

So, local is a relative term and is only one factor to be considered when looking at materials. LEED and BREEAM have very different ways of assessing the “regionality” of a material, neither of which are perfect. Neither explicitly cover local employment either, which is currently a hot topic in the UK. As I’ve said before, this is where sustainability strays into the field of politics and outside of most companies comfort zone. It’s all about balance.

Personally, I prefer to think in terms of the Natural Step framework, licenced in the UK by Forum for the Future. Two of the four system conditions explicitly refer to materials and are reflected the thinking behind such initiatives as Cradle to Cradle*:

• Society mines and disperses materials faster than they are returned to the Earth’s crust (examples include oil, coal and metals such as mercury and lead).
• Society produces substances faster than they can be broken down by natural processes—if they can be broken down at all (examples of such substances include dioxins, DDT and PCBs).

This isn’t as tough as it first sounds:

At first reading, the system conditions and basic principles might seem to imply that we must rid society of all materials extracted from the earth and all substances produced by society and that, further, we must never disturb a natural landscape. But that’s not what they mean. The problem is not that we mine and use heavy metals, or use chemicals and compounds produced by society, or disrupt natural processes, or even temporarily interfere with people’s capacity to meet their basic needs. It is, rather, that our industrial system has developed so that substances extracted from the earth and produced by society will continue to build up indefinitely in natural systems. That means a progressive buildup of pollutants and substances that not only harm us directly but damage natural processes that have taken billions of years to develop.

By applying these principles to any specific situation, a hierarchy of requirements will develop. Whilst it would be lovely to have a one-size-fits-all tickbox solution, in reality each situation is slightly different. Then again, I would say that. If I didn’t believe it to be the case, my work here would be done and I would be off doing aromatherapy!

*Cradle to Cradle and Natural Step are very much seperate, but complementary frameworks. Interestingly, LEED now reward the use of Cradle to Cradle certification.

Turns out it was all a predecessor to the BRE’s new standard BS6001. Martin has a good summary here. I welcome the standard (pdf, 32pp.), but I would be interested to see if it becomes mandatory in the forthcoming revisions. Currently the cost-benefit of the credit (i.e. the effort it takes to undertake all the paperwork vs. how many credits you ‘win’) means few clients are willing to pursue this one.