Entries for May 2008

Sustainable building practices are slowly moving into the commercial refurbishment and retrofit market, driven by both legislative requirements and good corporate housekeeping considerations. In the final part of a series on sustainable retrofit, Dr Paul K Hatchwell looks particularly at energy issues facing the sustainable offices sector

The conference run by Climate Change Solutions was a heady mix of high level policy initiatives aligned with practical examples of how different sectors in their efforts to reduce carbon.

The development aims for 900 habitable rooms per hectare at Code Level 4. Ben Kochan explains

By 2050 there could be as many as a million ground source heat pumps in use. Ben Kochan investigates

One of five key new powers of the Energy Bill, currently under scrutiny in the Lords, is to underpin the roll-out of smart meters to medium-sized business in the first instance, but potentially to the 44 million domestic consumers BERR minister Lord Jones of Birmingham told Conservative environment spokesman Lord Taylor of Holbeach in responding to the debate on the 2nd reading of the bill on 21 May.

Public funding of the Carbon Trust’s advisory role should be based on the Trust clearly demonstrating that its role cannot be undertaken by private sector advisory services instead, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) says in a new report on the  work of the trust.

Achieving higher BREEAM Schools ratings need not be prohibitively expensive and the main barrier to uptake is perceptions about additional costs, according to the new report from the BRE Trust and Faithful & Gould.

The European Commission announced on 13 May that it would promote the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) to improve energy efficiency throughout the economy, starting with buildings, lighting and electricity networks. These technologies include those commonly associated in the UK with energy management. The Commission says that ICT can enable greener behaviour across the economy and this could massively cut Europe’s carbon footprint.

A study of restaurants’ carbon footprints has revealed that the environmental cost of the imported food they use is much higher than previously thought and those imported from outside the European Union are more than 100 times those domestically produced.

The EU’s climate change and renewable energy goals should be seen as a chance for EU industries to become world leaders in sustainable technologies, says a report adopted by the European Parliament on 22 May. However, it was important to avoid a relocation of European industries to countries with less strict environmental policies “The EU’s environmental goals should not be seen as a threat to industry”, says the report drafted by Slovenian MEP Romana Jordan Cizelj. The EU’s objectives should be regarded “as an opportunity to gain a first mover advantage and make industry in the EU a world leader in environmentally friendly and socially acceptable technologies, products and services,” stressed MEPs in the debate on the report.