In a celebratory mood! In an out-of-the way valley among the rolling countryside of west Wales, a celebration is under way. Lammas, the UK’s only fully legal, rural, off grid eco village, has achieved two milestones. One is that their community hub building is now finished and signed off by Building
Summer 2015
Designing sustainable office space
The benefits of BREEAM
There are tools available to us to help meet our own aspirational targets and ensure our buildings are properly accredited to approved 'measurable' standards. For instance, the long awaited BREEAM non-domestic refurbishment scheme was published in October 2014. This new tool assesses the environmental impact of refurbishing or fitting out
The cost of green construction
The construction industry, like most business sectors, is continuously improving standards, so a building which only meets the minimum statutory requirements today would be considerably more environmentally friendly than an equivalent building built 10 or 20 years ago. Andrew Smith reports... As statutory minimum standards, best practice and industry standards continue
Sustainable construction – the road ahead
Sustainability is an issue of increasing importance for all of us and the creation and maintainance of sustainable buildings has never been so important to construction industry professionals right across the spectrum. Building owners and occupiers too demand an ever more stringent eco-footprint from the spaces they own, rent or
Lake District passivhaus
Following on from the series of articles in previous issues of 'Green Building' (Lancaster Cohousing certified Passivhaus project for 41 houses), Andrew Yeats and Vincent Fierkens from Eco Arc have worked with a local couple to build the first timber frame Passivhaus in the Lake District National Park. It is
Renewables mayhem!
In 2011, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a review of the generation costs of renewable electricity technologies. Onshore wind was one of the cheapest @ £90/MWh, well on par with fossil based power stations or new nuclear. This technology would have looked a good match to
It would be a waste to leave Europe
Grid defection
Well being – how do we measure it?
On the 15th May 2015 there was a very interesting meeting called ‘Enhancing wellbeing: inclusive, community collaborative approaches to place making’ at the University of Dundee. It was very well attended by many with a vested interest in improving people’s lives (often at little or no extra cost, it should be added).