Resourcing the future

Why do construction professionals choose resource efficiencies over labour productivity, rather than aspire to achieve both?

Such a supposedly sustainable approach considers human labour as the renewable resource.

This unnecessary polarisation favours savings in resource use, including land use, to the point that increasing urban density is now an obsession while construction remains a site based chore. So will our children thank us for sustainable development? Will the pursuit of sustainability turn construction into a resource efficient and capital intensive manufacturing industry, or just modernise the construction site?

In order just to stabilise our atmosphere we actually need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from industrialised countries by 70% to 90% by the year 2050.

Even if you don't care about the global environment there are many people more concerned about the personal risks we have to take in buildings these days.

Low energy construction has minimal impact on the environment, but you do not need to be limited as a designer.

Click to go to the discussion in this session chaired by Ian Abley

Will our children thank us for sustainable development?

Ian Abley (chairman) (Following Graeme Jennings) I am pleased to introduce Lucy Pedler who is a committee member of the Association for Environment Conscious Building, and consulting architect at Construction Resources, the first ecological building merchant in Britain.

Lucy Pedler Thank you and good morning everybody. I shall be spending my ten minute slot trying to convince you that the answer is yes, our children will thank us for turning to sustainable development.

I will not be spending the next ten minutes trying to define sustainability. I do find it a little bit tedious to be involved in the sort of endless debate about the meaning of sustainability. There are many definitions, they all cover so many issues, and they all assume the necessity of sustaining our ecosystem in some way or other.

I work as a product specialist at Construction Resources, and we promote sustainable building materials. What we mean by that is environmentally sound building materials and systems. Our clients come to us for many different reasons. Some may be concerned with the toxins in the building so they are looking at an alternative to synthetic paints, for a natural alternative to paints. Others might have a strong desire to reduce the use of fossil fuels so they will be asking our advice on solar panels. Some may express concerns about products with higher embodied energy, so we will be looking to talk to them about products with low embodied energy, like clay for example.

So will our children thank us? There are many, many statistics around, and you will know a lot about the way our ecosystem is going. I will just reinforce how imperative it is that we have to protect the environment.

There is the very, very depressing matter of reduction in rain forest. Some of these forests have existed in the same form for millions of years, and current rain forest destruction occurs at the rate of 100 acres per minute. In other words one thousand acres of rain forest will be destroyed by the time I reach the end of my talk. It is a shocking statistic, but the results of the rain forest destruction are obviously change in climatic conditions and soil erosion, which have caused a vast reduction in bio diversity. Many plant and animals species will die out and become extinct before we have even had a chance to name them. There is the potential that we will never know about them. It has been predicted that by the year 2025 half of our animal and plant species will be gone.

Atmospheric pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels is recognised as one of the most pressing threats to our ecosystem. The increase in carbon dioxide emissions is causing global warming and climate change, and there is a direct relationship between the amount of fossil fuels we use and the amount of carbon dioxide we produce. As Graham has already mentioned, over half of our national energy bill goes into servicing buildings, so those of us in the Construction industry have a real responsibility to greatly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that development produces. This will be no mean feat.

In order just to stabilise our atmosphere we actually need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from industrialised countries by 70% to 90% by the year 2050. That is almost so implausible that you may think, "why bother to try?" However it can be achieved with a real change in how we produce buildings.

Even if you don't care about the global environment there are many people more concerned about the personal risks we have to take in buildings these days. We spend about 80% of our lives inside buildings, surrounding ourselves with predominately synthetic materials.

Synthetic paints for example have hundreds of synthetic chemicals, and if you put the manufacturing by-products aside, the toxins in these paints have disastrous affects on our health. The World Health Organisation has stated that painting is carcinogenic. In their occupation painters have a 20% higher rate of contracting lung cancer and a 40% higher rate of contracting any other type of cancer. This does show that continued exposure to these synthetic products is not good for us.

Mineral fibre is one of the most widely and commonly used materials in the building industry for insulation and fire protection, but has multiple environmental impacts. It has a very high embodied energy. Consider heating rock up to 1500°C and the amount of energy that has gone into making the fibres, along with the formaldehyde resins that are then used to bind the fibres together. Formaldehyde is a well-known health hazard, because it irritates skin, eyes and lungs, and it is possibly carcinogenic. Mineral fibres are now considered small enough to be as carcinogenic as asbestos, so that workers in the construction industry inhaling fibres over a period of time, have a 25% higher risk of lung cancer. In the USA they have a warning on the packaging of mineral fibre to say there is a possible cancer hazard by inhalation.

Aside from the health risk I've recently got hold of a report on how mineral fibre actually holds moisture against the structure. It is actually quite detrimental to a timber frame, because it raises the moisture content, and starts to allow fungal growth and rot into the timber frame construction. So mineral fibre is not the sort of easy, cheap material that we all thought, but is currently being used very widely.

So whether for altruistic or selfish motivations there are good reasons to try and reduce the impact our buildings have on the Environment. These are very depressing facts. The conference introduction provocatively suggests that in order to save the environment from our impact, we should revert to a past of labour intensive simple technology to produce unimaginative buildings. Building with the environment in mind is the way forward, not the way back. We can look back to fantastic earth structures, for example in Yemen, but there are also modern interpretations of rammed earth. There was a rather dull type of architecture produced when the use of solar panels was first experimented with. We have gone a long way since then, fortunately.

We have no excuse to build such uninspiring buildings in the name of protecting the environment, although I do understand the common criticism of embracing technology for every function of the building. A relatively simple structural technology to use is prefabricated factory controlled timber panel construction. The panels have insulation values significantly better than the building regulations currently require, and reducing overall heat loss they reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So if you like timber framed or panel building it has many true "greeny points".

Low energy construction has minimal impact on the environment, but you do not need to be limited as a designer. By designing ecologically, you can feel inspired, you can feel challenged, and ecological design can take you and your clients to new heights. Most of all remember that this ecosystem is the only one we have, it is stunningly beautiful in some parts of the world, and I would like to keep at least some of it that way for my children.

Ian AbleyThe argument for low embodied energy ecological design is leading to an aesthetic discussion to be pursued with Brian Edwards, Duncan Price and Alex Cutler in the next session, Being inspired. In the discussion for the theme of Resourcing the future I want to take a step back, and work through something I find personally difficult to deal with in my job as a site architect.

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