What I’ve been reading about:
mel starrs News CSR, recycling
These are my links for August 26th through August 28th:
- Sending recycling to China ‘better than binning it’ – "This study sought to answer the specific question of whether the CO2 emissions from the transport outweighed the benefits of the recycling. It quantifies the CO2 emissions from transporting one tonne of recovered mixed paper or recovered plastic (PET/HDPE) bottles to China. It assumes that the carbon savings of recycling in China are similar to those identified in other countries, including the UK. "
- Soft Landings – "Welcome to Soft Landings, a joint initiative between BSRIA, the Usable Buildings Trust and the Darwin Consultancy, that enables a graduated handover for new and refurbished buildings. The Soft Landings project will result in a set of procedures and worksteps for project teams to stay engaged with buildings after practical completion."
- National Statistics Online – Product – Construction Statistics Annual – 266 page pdf – "Responsibility for producing the Construction Statistics Annual, starting with the 2008 edition, has been transferred from BERR to the ONS.
Brings together under one cover a wide range of statistics that are currently available on the construction industry. It gives a broad perspective of statistical trends in the construction industry in Great Britain through the last decade together with some international comparisons and features on leading initiatives that may influence the future.
Contains construction output and new orders, tender price, output price and cost indices, data on building materials, floorspace statistics, local and central government expenditure, lottery funded projects, international comparisons, employment statistics, workload of professionals, planning applications,…"
- Puffbox.com » Archive » Another reason to use Twitter – Good advice from Simon on how businesses could be using Twitter.
- Inhabitat » ZIGGURAT: Dubai Carbon Neutral Pyramid will House 1 Million – Another grand plan for Dubai – this time a Ziggurat. Apparently they'll be able to grow food (in greenhouses???). Would love to know more about this – for instance how will they get daylight deep into the middle of the base of the pyramid? And who are these 1 million inhabitants? It really does look like something from Star Trek, which sadly quite excites me, despite my inner cynic screaming that it can't possibly be sustainable. Quite happy to be proven wrong…
mel starrs News built_environment, China, construction_industry, Dubai, handover, POE, recycling, seo, statistics, Sustainability, twitter, waste
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
I find this story hard to believe – EST (Energy Saving Trust) are reporting:
“Leeds has come first in a list of the top English regions for recycling.
The city recycled 17.3 per cent of all of its household waste during 2005-06, the study by union GMB revealed.”
A quick straw poll around the office confirms my own personal experience – recycling collections from domestic properties are sketchy at best. If the figures are based on volume, they could be explained by Leeds’ better than average household waste recycling centres of which there are 11* dotted around the city. Kudos has to go to the householders for transporting their waste to these centres. The council does not pick up glass from domestic properties – so all bottles have to be taken to bottle banks. They will pick up plastic, card, paper and cans. Virtually everything else can be recycled at the centres (including batteries, spectacles, clothing and ink cartridges).
My thoughts on this are mixed – I would love to be able to put all my recycling in a box by the front door and have it picked up once a week. However, if the numbers above are true, then maybe investment in really good recycling centres is a better use of public money?
* I tried searching for a photo of one of the sites on Flickr to illustrate them. If you put ‘leeds’ and ‘waste’ into Flickr search engine you just end up with lots of photos of drunk strangers.
mel starrs News Energy Saving Trust, Leeds, recycling, search engine
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