RED 24 Management

EcoBuild

Phill Williams | 03-04-12

Ecobuild is the worlds biggest show for sustainable building and if you weren’t there, you’ve missed it. I went along the very first year, a small show peppered with bearded, slightly surprised men, who wondered how so many people had got interested in their lime plaster.

Now it’s one of the few shows to take all the floor space at the huge ExCel Exhibition Halls at the Royal Victoria Docks, London. The docks themselves reused and re vitalised years ago.

This really is now a vast show. 1500 suppliers exhibiting and over 130 conference and seminar sessions. The place to find out, talk about and be amongst the sustainable building industry. My ‘old friends’ were there, Barbara Jones persuading people straw bales work, Bill Dunster and Zedfactory, wonderfully frustrated by people seemingly still not ‘getting it’, Solar Century with Jeremy Leggett banging the solar drum.

But this year, it seemed more like normality than any other year. Even the word ‘sustainable’ much less on view. The industry is very much in step, forced, definitely.. but marching towards one common horizon.

I can’t say it’s a day too soon. I found myself giving in to the forces of supply and demand by drinking a £4 coffee to celebrate. Who cares about money when the world is spinning just as it should…

Well.. perhaps we should care. My final visit was to a bamboo importer. A product that grows so ridiculously fast you wouldn’t hang your coat on it. The American owner, had no answer when I asked him why it was so much more expensive than oak, impossibly slow growing. In the end he settled on “it’s new”..

So many people make coffee now, I know I can buy a perfect and artistically fluffed one for just over £1.. supply and demand wins.

Sustainable building is going mainstream, it’ll be as popular as coffee, it’s almost normal.. market forces will drive prices down and we’ll all be winners.. all except Mr Bamboo.

Phill

I Don’t Want to Wait…

Phill Williams | 07-11-11

Recently, I was lucky enough to be part of a sustainability conference deep in the heart of the Maldives.

The SLOW Sypmosium gathers 40 or so of the top movers and shakers in sustainability and takes them away from everything else so that they can concentrate on what matters… finding answers.

Richard Branson, Tim Smit, Jonathon Porritt, Daryl Hannah and Ed Norton where all present, all big guns in the sustainable world. They were highlighting tourism, but the engaging positive language being used could ring through the ears of anyone interested in sustainability.

I came away from the beaches with more information, more figures and, if I’m honest, a twinge of panic. Not because the world’s going to end, it’s not. More because these very clever people were corralled on an island and they all new and agreed on the problems, and how large they were.

There was no axe grinding, no showmanship… no alternative agendas. Just relaxed intelligent people, agreeing to agree that if something wasn’t done, hardship would reign.

I want my politicians to stand up and change things. I’ve said that before. But maybe it’s also the language we use to persuade others to stand up, listen and make their own informed decision. Because, if you are informed, even just a little, there’s no confusion.

The problem isn’t finding out how bad it is, we know that. The problem isn’t finding an answer, there’s heaps of those we can try. The problem is humans aren’t rash by nature, they wait. A big disaster happens, then we change things, even though we knew the big disaster could happen. I guess that’s where the twinge came from.

People, not the politicians, have the real power to speak with their actions. I don’t want to wait.

Phill Williams

23.06.11

Phill Williams | 23-06-11

Phill Williams – Money Collection

It’s a Wednesday in June, you’d think summer would be here? No. I’m looking out of the window wondering how much power the solar panels are going to make in this rain and I start to think about the next project. The water that’s falling reasonably purely from the sky, hits my roof, trickles towards the gutter where it passes by me on it’s way to the drain.

Every day, Thames Water supplies 2,600,000,000 litres of potable tap water from 100 water treatment works through 32,000 kilometres (20,000 mi) of managed water mains to the 8.7 million customers across just London and the Thames Valley. All of that is sourced from rivers and groundwater. What fills up rivers and groundwater? …the water that’s trickling down my slates. It’s at moments like this that the world seems like an awfully complicated place.

It’s a fact that the water passing me by, will be pumped expensively all the way back to my kitchen tap, where I’ll filter it myself, fill the kettle, make a tea, and wonder if that’s a good thing.

In Australia, just like here, water falls from the sky. There, they collect it off the roof, put it in a tank in the garden and drink it when they’re thirsty. Simple? so why is our water so complicated and ultimately expensive. Shun your sceptics head when I tell you with a deft swipe of irony that Thames Water is owned by Australian banks. They’re a company, with shareholders who want to make money. Whatever they say, they don’t want you to use less water. If they did, they’d give us all a water butt.

Rainwater harvesting is the forgotten sustainable utility.

For new builds the options are easy. Bury a tank to collect the rainwater, dig smaller soak aways for your gutters and then pipe the water using the normal routes for bathrooms, washing and utility rooms. There is a debate raging about how safe rainwater is to drink and ultimately, it depends on how safe you think the world is. If you’d worry about pollutants in the air or the cleanliness of your collection system, then just run the normal mains water to your kitchen and drink/cook with that. You’ll save on your bills but more importantly, you’ll save the water companies the trouble, effort, energy and cost of pumping water to you so you can just flush it away.

Retrofitting might actually be easier if you’ve the room for the tank. Again, bury a tank and simply plumb it into your normal water pipes. If you’d rather not drink the rainwater, just re route your original supply separately to the kitchen to drink and cook with.

Regardless of where the water comes from, we need to use less of it. A key to sustainability is using what we have more sensibly and taking care not to waste what there is. From an integrated hand basin in the cistern to a complete pre assembled one stop solution to rainwater harvesting, consider your options and don’t let water pass you by.

Phill Williams

19.04.11

Phill Williams | 19-04-11

Phill Williams – Who thought, ‘re-use’ ?

At the core of sustainability is the understanding that we should use things ‘better’. It’s pretty simple. That can be raw materials, energy or, even housing.

I met David Ireland in his office, the man behind ‘emptyhomes.com.’

The statistics that David’s keen to promote say there’s less of a housing shortage than we’re led to believe.

Emptyhomes dug into the housing figures from local councils and added up how many were claiming to be empty. The figure is now, dauntingly, 750,000 empty homes across the UK.

So while we’re all keen to build our new Code 6 house, is it feasible to look at an empty home to get something close.

Their study, ‘New Tricks with Old Bricks’ says ‘yes’.

“Embodied CO2 is an investment in the environmental sustainability of a house. Refurbished old homes have lower embodied CO2 and therefore a distinct head start over new homes.” David adds, “the renovation of an empty house creates about a third of the CO2 emissions of building a new house.”

So keep this in mind. As you stand on your empty plot thinking how many straw bales you can fit on it, question whether it’s really the thrill of a new build, or true sustainability that’s driving you on. If it’s the latter, you might think harder about renovating something and suffering the inevitable compromises that brings. It’s a tough question.

Phill Williams