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Transforming our cities from grey to green
Martin Hunt, March 11th 2010, Built environment
It was great to see the launch of the Integrated Habitats Design Competition last week – a competition that seeks out inspiring and innovative designers who emphasise the value of biodiversity and nature in our built surroundings. A competition that places significant weight on nature contributing to healthy, low-energy, high-quality environments will hopefully help the spread and uptake of best practice in greening our cities.
Integrated design and a greater focus on green infrastructure is not just the domain of planners, the owners of allotments or the managers of our very important inner city parks. Access to high quality green space, the provision of native trees for solar shading, designing building solutions to support threatened species, or the application of sustainable drainage systems do not just help conserve or enhance local ecology - they are also vital to our health and wellbeing (and happiness). They are also vital for the long-term resilience of urban areas in the face of over-heating or flooding associated with climate change. Convinced of this, I’m very happy to support and endorse this new design competition and look forward to evaluating the submissions with my fellow judges during the summer!
The competition was launched at Ecobuild last week (see Jonathon Porritt’s blog), and it was great to see this event really gathering momentum, and size. For me, Ecobuild highlighted the need for our designers and builders to put nature before technological fixes. I was privy to discussions and debates around biomimicry, the provision of food growing space in schools, and planning for more trees in our cities. But I was also impressed by the drive and enthusiasm of the many professionals trying to deliver more sustainable homes, schools, hospitals, offices, and other forms of infrastructure. There were literally hundreds of suppliers showing off their latest green products – from natural paints and SMART meters, to micro-CHP units and recycled benches.
Please visit www.ihdc.org.uk for further information on the Integrated Habitats Design Competition. The competition is supported by CIRIA and organised by Dusty Gedge, the UK’s leading living roofs expert, Gary Grant, one of the UK’s leading ecologists, and RESET, the sustainable design training charity. Judges and endorsers come a wide range of backgrounds, including government agencies, professional institutions and NGOs.
Participants have until 30th June to enter and finalists will exhibit at the Building Centre in central London for five weeks over September, during which time the final awards will be presented at the World Green Roof Congress on the 15th September.
Are we failing to see the wood for the gadgets?
Martin Hunt, March 10th 2010, Built environment, General
I’ve recently found myself questioning whether we are becoming over-reliant on technological fixes to the sustainability challenges we face today. Are we in danger of falling for ‘techno-wash’ as a way of avoiding some more fundamental (and maybe more painful) decisions about the way we live our lives? Does technology sometimes obscure the bigger picture?
Did you see the story about one of the government’s new flagship schools pulling the plug on interactive whiteboards and other wireless components, and reverting to pen and paper? Teachers wanted to avoid wasting time when systems failed to function properly, and losing the attention of pupils.
How about this recent post on our website? It made me laugh. Apparently iPhone users can now download an app to show them whether they should stop using said app, and pocket their iPhone. The so-called ASBO app displays 'anti-social behaviour' statistics for the user's current location. My knee-jerk reaction was to assume the reason for the app was to simply tell users to “get off the thing, be sociable and actually talk to your mates”. And I know I wasn’t alone in that reaction.
Get off your Luddite high horse I hear you cry. Ok, I’ll admit to being a bit of a technophobe. I’m frequently in deep and murky waters when trying to talk about apps or Twitter and feel a killjoy when I question whether the latest fashionable gadget really does makes life a lot easier or much more pleasurable. Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic benefits to most of our advances in technology, be that the wheel, windmill or the worldwide web. I just become a bit irrational or disconcerted about our reliance on shiny technology sometimes.
But this is a really important issue as we seek to develop a low carbon economy and society. For example, the Zero Carbon Hub’s report rightly suggests that a lot more needs to be done to market zero carbon homes. It highlights the fact that while consumers are happy to take a risk on the next cool gadget, they won’t take a punt on a zero carbon home because it is perceived to be too futuristic, hi-tech and experimental. When you consider the money involved, that’s not a surprise – the appetite for fashionable, innovative technology will obviously take the consumer only so far.
Of course in years to come, I’ve no doubt that the highly fashionable iPhone or a super duper variation will be integral to remotely managing the heating in your home, rotating your roof top renewables, or altering the tints in your windows! And I acknowledge we will not be able to deliver a truly zero carbon home that is fit for our expectations without the help of technology.
It’s all very well to try and paint a positive vision of a low-carbon future, replete with whizz bang applications (sorry, apps) and smart technology, but there is a danger that we can turn some people off (not literally) by placing too much emphasis on high-tech solutions. Indeed, from my work with building design professionals and their clients, I know that technology can be a distraction from low-tech, passive solutions that can have a bigger overall impact.
The old adage of avoid, reduce, then replace (fossil fuel sources on energy) continues to serve us well. Being clever about building form and orientation, and concentrating on the fabric of our buildings must come before the signing of cheques for ground source heat pumps or micro-wind turbines. And it is certainly time we stop hearing about buildings that have photovoltaic arrays or solar panels on north-facing roofs!
So, here’s a plea – don’t forget the simple, low-tech decisions we can all take which deliver greater benefits than that shiny item that sits on your roof, in your office or in your pocket. Technology has its place in making our world more sustainable, but our collective understanding of what our priorities should be and the changes in behaviour which will flow from that should have much more of a lasting legacy.
Martin Hunt is Head of Built Environment at Forum for the Future
No more niches – we need sustainable innovation at scale
Jonathon Porritt, March 9th 2010, Built environment, Forum founders
It’s the scale of it all that is sometimes daunting. On energy, for instance, we have to transition from around 90% dependency on fossil fuels to around 90% on renewables – allowing a little bit of residual space for cleaner and super-efficient fossil fuels (aviation, amongst other things, where technological substitution is always going to be limited). If we had two hundred years to make all that happen, it would be fine. But we don’t. Between 2025 and 2050 is seen by most scientists as the outer time limit available to us.
Which will require an unprecedented level of innovation in every sector of the economy. And that means getting scale in all those sectors to get the right drivers in place to make the innovation happen. From niche to mainstream. Easy! But scale means different things in different sectors.
I spent a day last week at Ecobuild - ‘the biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment’. That absolutely wasn’t a claim that could have been made at the first Ecobuild, five years ago, which attracted no more than 1000 visitors. This year, there were more than 50,000 people there. Earls Court was flush with exhibitors, from some of the biggest companies in the UK to distinctly ‘alternative’ start-ups taking a massive gamble on enough people falling for their particular ‘breakthrough innovation’. There were countless meetings and debates going on the whole time, and the kind of buzz that one doesn’t always associate with events of this kind.
For the politicians who’d dropped in, and wandered around looking a bit bemused, it all said one thing: no more niches. This was about scale. New orders. Expanding markets. Innovation (in the construction industry!). And even, dare one say it, new jobs.
I won’t be churlish by pointing out that this supply-chain journey (from niche to huge, scaled opportunity) could have been stimulated by the political system many years ago – as it was in Germany, Scandinavia and so on. At least we’ve got there now, and it’s exciting.
The UK Green Building Council has been a central part of that journey, and is now providing the kind of leadership (across this complex industry and beyond) that the politicians need in order to stay in touch with the developments on the ground. The UK Green Building Council launched its new Green Building Manifesto at Ecobuild – and it’s well worth a look.
Paint your business green with sustainable innovation
Chris Sherwin, January 27th 2010, Built environment, Business, Innovation, Procurement
Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.
Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.
The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.
Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.
The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.
Here are a few of the innovations:
- Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
- Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans. - Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
- Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.
We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.
Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.
Carbon in our roads and rails – the bigger picture
Lorna Pelly, December 14th 2009, Built environment, General, Transport
Should an engineer designing a new road worry about the embodied carbon of a traffic cone? Should they be calculating the carbon sink opportunity of putting a shrubbery in the middle of a roundabout?
Perhaps not, but they should be considering the further maintenance and operation associated with the project and yes – the million dollar question - they should definitely be thinking about the 34 million cars registered in the UK which could drive on the new road.
Traditionally, design and build infrastructure projects have concentrated on just that - delivering a new asset ready for use, and then handing this over for operation. Anything beyond that - maintenance or repair, or the ongoing use of the asset - simply didn’t fall under the remit of the designer.
Over time however, contracts have expanded in scope, and contractors are now often expected to take on the first five or ten years of operation and maintenance to ensure they plan for the future. Any serious ambitions to rethink our approach to infrastructure to reduce carbon also need to take this wider, whole-life approach.
To take one example, when specifying a motorway central reservation with low carbon in mind, a road engineer may well opt for a metal barrier rather than the full concrete block. But if they were asked to think about the use of the road over the next 50-100 years and the maintenance of that central reservation, they might come to a different conclusion. The metal barrier – though lower in embodied carbon – is likely to be replaced more often than the concrete one, each time requiring a lane to be shut down, causing congestion and consequently a more significant whole-life carbon output.
Four major clients and experienced delivery partners working in infrastructure teamed up with Forum for the Future to think about a consistent method of approach for more holistic carbon management. Through the Engineers of the 21st Century programme, The Highways Agency, Network Rail (supported by RSSB), Atkins and Balfour Beatty tasked young engineers from each organisation to develop a way of assessing and managing the whole-life carbon of an infrastructure project. They came up with a carbon framework, a set of guidance principles and methods of assessment to start developing a common approach for carbon management.
Infrastructure projects, such as building or renewing roads or rail tracks, can take years in the design and build stages, involving a vast list of stakeholders and partners. To manage projects of this size, you have to break them down into contractual stages, supplier frameworks, scope of works and so on, all of which lead towards working within preset boundaries. But what we really want to know at the start of a project is ‘what will be the full carbon impact of doing this?’ or ‘which of our three major options would be lowest carbon overall?’
If the scope of infrastructure projects is expanded to include maintaining and using assets as well as building them, the first challenge is to understand what then falls within the full boundary of each project. If you are considering the impact of people driving on a new or improved road, do you need to also consider the embodied carbon of the cars? And when the construction phase causes congestion or diversions on existing roads, or those popular bus replacement services when railways are being maintained – should that be included in the project carbon total as well? And what about the embodied carbon of the sandwiches eaten by the construction workers on the site, or the paint on the white lines that need to be touched up 20 years later – do we really have to include that much detail to get a full picture?
The carbon framework offers general rules of thumb that will help with these tricky questions. It suggests that first, you should consider all carbon caused directly by a project. Once you have drawn the big circle around the full impact of the project, you can prioritise what carbon you will actively manage and, perhaps more controversially, what carbon you can dismiss because either you cannot influence it or because it is insignificant.
The framework sets out three main categories: carbon you will report (all carbon within the boundary of the project); carbon you will manage (significant, controllable and reducible carbon within the boundary); and carbon you will influence (significant, reducible carbon that may be in or out of the boundary).
It is in this influence box that we can start putting some big issues. A client or designer may not be able to control the number or type of cars driving on a road, but they can influence how they drive with smart design and traffic management. And the carbon reductions available from these kinds of interventions are significant.
The objective is really to enable smarter management of carbon. As carbon becomes an increasingly important factor in projects, the first reaction is to grab whatever data is available, apply some carbon conversion factors and set a reduction target. However, as our understanding matures we need to take a step back and think about where we can get the biggest and quickest carbon reductions – moving on from the low hanging fruit to the big, juicy fruit.
We need serious conversations about a project’s overall carbon impact at the early decision and design stage, informed by clear carbon estimates, in order to sensibly plan for lower-carbon infrastructure.
Balance makes Newcastle Britain’s most sustainable city
Helen Clarkson, November 19th 2009, Cities, Built environment, General, Public Sector
Today we unveil our third annual Sustainable Cities Index and the big news is that Newcastle is Britain’s most sustainable city, knocking the previous two winners – Bristol and Brighton – into second and third places respectively.
This might come as a big surprise as unlike those other cities, Newcastle doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly ‘green’. But Newcastle has won because it does fairly well across the whole set of indicators we use to capture a balanced picture of cities’ sustainability, with no particular area of weakness.
The Sustainable Cities Index ranks Britain’s 20 largest cities according to their performance in three broad areas: their impact on the environment, their citizens’ quality of life, and their readiness for future challenges. Both Bristol and Brighton have great scores on our quality of life and future-proofing indicators, but perform less well on environmental impact, bringing them down overall.
For me that reinforces one of the key messages about sustainability, that it’s all about striking a balance between the economic, the environmental and the social, and avoiding trade-offs.
It’s also interesting that our cities that do have green reputations are weaker on environmental indicators than others. That could suggest that some of their reputation is built on the quality of life they offer, so maybe people do understand being green in that broader sense. Good news for those of us who make our living saying just that!
With all the talk over the last year about green economic recovery, we also thought it was timely to ask what that means at a city level. People use the term to mean a lot of different things from making existing business more energy efficient, right through to challenging the capitalist economic model.
We’ve found that there is plenty that local authorities can be doing to promote green economic recovery at different levels. They can work with businesses to understand their reliance on the local environment and society, they can direct their own spend on to more sustainable goods and services, and they can encourage and promote the innovation that we’ll need to move into a more sustainable future.
Our winning city – Newcastle – is located in the country’s first designated Low Carbon Economic Area. Manchester has plans to build on its industrial heritage to lead the way to a cleaner future. And Birmingham is also thinking about its contribution to the next industrial revolution.
Cities that find the sweet-spot of low-carbon innovation that grows the local economy, providing jobs and better quality of life will be the truly sustainable cities of tomorrow. The race is on.
Straw really does keep the wolf from the door
Paul Rainger, July 22nd 2009, Built environment
I'll huff and I'll puff, but we'll build that house up.
Let's face it, until Kevin McCloud and Grand Designs came along, the reputation of straw houses was not good. Largely thanks to the tale of the Three Pigs, a story that, with hindsight, looks suspiciously like a piece of inspired viral marketing by the Brick Manufacturers Association.
But that situation looks set to change this week, with work getting underway on Bath University’s pioneering project to build a two-storey straw house on campus, confirming the West of England's reputation as the UK's leader in urban sustainability.
The two-storey BaleHaus is being built using prefabricated panels made from wooden frames filled with straw and hemp then rendered with a weather-proof coating. Straw provides such high levels of insulation that it is anticipated the house will need very little additional heating beyond that provided by the occupants themselves. A handy saving on the £400 average heating bill for a family semi.
The eco-build uses prefabricated straw panels: ModCells are made by Forum's friends White Design in Bristol and Integral Structural Design in Bath, with embedded sensors to allow Bath University to monitor the temperature and humidity levels.
Bath's BaleHaus is due to be finished by late summer, but perhaps best of all, you can watch the construction progressing for yourself via a live webcam.
With a year of monitoring then to follow, Bath University will be able to show how straw, that most sustainable of building materials, really can help keep the wolf from the door.
Image: Nic Neish
Fast-tracking sustainability into professions
Sara Parkin, June 4th 2009, Built environment
To the sunny terrace of the House of Commons for the launch of the Engineering Council’s Guidance on Sustainability the other week. The place was unnaturally quiet, and if a tumbril had rolled across the lobby carrying bodies of disgraced MPs I would not have been surprised.
Confirming that he was probably the only MP in the building (and ‘clean’ as far as his expenses were concerned) Brian Iddon gave the main speech of congratulations. As a member of the Industry, Universities and Science Committee and a founder member of the Environmental Audit Committee, Brian was genuinely enthusiastic about the new guidelines and congratulated the Engineering Council on its pioneering work on getting sustainability into the heart of engineering practice.
And indeed, while the story may lack the glamour of M&S’s Plan A, what the engineers are doing is hugely important because it will influence every sector of the economy. Since 2005 all engineers wishing to gain Chartered status in the UK have had to demonstrate 'sustainability competencies', a change to professional standards for registration which some of Forum’s young engineers helped to bring about. Percolating the implications to education and training through the many specialist engineering institutions and university departments is now well underway.
Some other professions have followed suit, notably accountancy. But others are lagging, citing institutions unaccustomed to rapid change. Not a viable excuse any more. Urgent transfusions of sustainability throughout the system are needed, and as almost everybody belongs to some professional or trade association, where better to fast-track sustainability literacy throughout the existing and future workforce? Not exciting, but essential. The Engineering Council has shown it can be done.
To read about Forum's Engineers for the 21st Century programme (E21C) - which is all about engaging the engineering profession in sustainability - click here.
Updated June 8th:
Several voices have joined in to support an Industry, Universities and Science Committee’s recommendation that the government should appoint Chief Engineering Advisors as they do Chief Scientific Advisors. I think it is a terrific idea. Getting down to the practicalities of implementing radical carbon reduction strategies will be greatly helped if some Clark Kents of the engineering world don super(wo)man kits and swoop about a bit. If you agree let the committee know on iuscomm@parliament.uk.
Image: Sara Parkin, Andrew Ramsay, Ken Fidler
Homes fit for the future
Ben Ross, March 18th 2009, Cities, Built environment
Last June, in the Green Futures supplement The Future is Retrofit, we referred to the existing housing stock as 'the elephant in the room'. It feels like we’ve come a long way since then.
Domestic energy demand and its associated carbon emissions are breaking into our news media, and the government is mid-way through three consultations on increasing the energy efficiency of our homes. While insulation still isn’t exactly sexy, it is becoming a dinner party discussion, rather than a conversation killer.
Nationally, we’re still working out the best way to deal with this enormous pachyderm in our midst…do we push or pull it, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century? Considering the size of the beast (our homes are responsible for 27% of the UK’s carbon emissions) it’s going to take a lot of both, but we’ve got to be careful which bits we push/pull, and how hard, to avoid the law of unintended consequences. We don’t want to bolt on ‘eco-bling’ before we’ve increased the thermal envelope of the building.
We’ve taken on this challenge as part of our project to help make Bristol the UK’s most sustainable city-region. ‘Refit West’ is a consortium of local housing experts and specialist delivery partners coordinated by Forum for the Future. The scheme aims to overcome a number of the main barriers: raising demand through a savy marketing and PR campaign; providing loan finance to encourage uptake; and building a strong coalition of trusted surveyors and builders to do the works to a high standard with minimum disruption.
Projects will prioritise demand reduction and efficiency before the installation of low- or zero-carbon energy generation. With the aim being to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the scheme will also offer opportunities to reduce water consumption and waste sent to landfill.
We’ll pilot the scheme this summer by refitting 10 demonstration homes for the main housing types in the area. Then from the autumn onwards, as the heating season returns, we’ll be scaling up our activities. We aim to have completed works on the first 1,000 homes by the end of 2011.
There are people out there who have reduced the CO2 emissions from their homes by 60% or more (27 of them are part of the Old Home Super Home network), which shows that this is technically possible. However, these trail blazers represent just 0.000001% of our 27 million dwellings in the UK.
Our current housing stock represents one of the simplest and most cost-effective approaches to carbon abatement. Government is currently proposing that all of our homes will have received a ‘whole house’ package of energy efficiency measures by 2030 and that domestic carbon emissions should be approaching zero by 2050.
It’s a massive project, and one that will affect every single person in the UK, as our homes are made fit for the future. However, one thing is increasingly clear - if we don’t tackle home energy efficiency at large scale that elephant won’t just quietly slip out the back door but will become increasingly dangerous, trampling any chance we have of hitting our national carbon targets.
Leading the building of sustainable schools
Jane Wilkinson, December 23rd 2008, Built environment, Public Sector
The biggest school building programme in a generation presents a unique opportunity to incorporate sustainability into the very DNA of our schools.
It also places new demands and responsibilities on school leaders. Head teachers, governors and bursars are key players in achieving this goal. What skills and knowledge do they need to work with the construction sector and numerous other stakeholders to create sustainable school buildings?
We’ve looked at this question in a new report commissioned by the agency that trains school leaders, the National College for School Leadership. Leading sustainable school building projects is produced by Forum for the Future in collaboration with the Sustainable Development Foundation and Cambridge Architectural Research.
The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme aims to rebuild or renovate every one of the country’s 3,500 state secondary schools in the next ten years. Launched by the Department for Education & Skills in 2004, it will transform education for some 3.3 million students aged 11-19. The government has committed £9.3 billion for the BSF programme over the next three years. Around 1,000 secondary schools in over half the local authorities in England are now engaged in the programme with 42 schools revitalised and a target of 50 to be completed by April.
The programme aims to deliver better learning environments for all students, better teaching environments for all education professionals, and better access to facilities for local residents. It has committed to reducing carbon emissions from schools, with all buildings making the most of sustainable features to help protect the environment and reduce overheads.
But our research went beyond this and also looked at how to deliver sustainable learning. We interviewed leaders of 11 exemplar schools as well as conducting an online survey of a larger group, and we found that the rebuilding process presents a perfect opportunity for a school to rethink its approach to learning and consider how its buildings can become a resource for action centred teaching and learning.
For example, American researchers have found that students get better results when learning in rooms with plenty of natural light. It’s also important to ensure multi-functional spaces are created, designed for community as well as school use and that there is sufficient outdoor space for learning throughout the year.
There is a real opportunity for linking the school site to curriculum delivery by engaging pupils in managing environmental impacts. For example measuring water consumption and energy use as part of their course work. A school eco-council can involve pupils in managing and maintaining buildings.
Sustainable features such as photovoltaic panels and green roofs, as well as providing learning opportunities can make the school a beacon of sustainability of interest to the wider community.
What makes a good leader when building a sustainable school? We found that these individuals consult widely, are skilled communicators who can excite others with their vision, and show determination, drive and forcefulness in seeing through their aims. The three most important leadership roles are, unsurprisingly, those of the head teacher, architect and chair of governors.
A barrier we discovered was the apparent lack of support and expertise to support implementation of the government’s Sustainable Schools strategy within Local Authorities. We recommend that a sustainability adviser be attached to the Building Schools for the Future programme or Local Authorities. They would provide specialist sustainable development advice to school leaders, in parallel to the kind of support they already receive through ICT advisers.
Our report proposes a set of principles to guide building development and in particular the initial briefing process. We also spell out what steps leaders need to take during procurement, and to encourage the adoption of best practice in areas such as whole life costing (estimating the entire cost of achieving a design outcome) and post-occupancy evaluation (evaluation of the results once people are using the building). It includes guidance for school leaders on how to create a sustainable school estate as well as case studies giving such details as the key individuals in each school that made it happen along with their main learning points.
Since the research was completed, it is encouraging to see that more much emphasis is being placed on incorporating sustainability into school build and that resources are being developed to support this.
This research forms part of Forum’s ongoing work with school leaders for the National College for School Leadership. We are currently supporting the development of leaders in 56 schools to help them actively explore and share innovative practice in leading sustainable schools in order to develop a stronger evidence base and inform policy and practice.
Image: vahamrick
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