Four arrested over trading carbon credits

London & Leicester UK
Four people were arrested in early morning raids on 20 May 2010 by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) officers investigating a £38 million suspected VAT fraud. The alleged fraud involved the trading 'carbon credits' which are emission allowances.

The fraudulent companies allegedly purchased carbon credits from overseas VAT free sources and then sold them on to businesses in the UK at a VAT inclusive price. The VAT charged by the fraudulent companies was never paid to HMRC.

News Distribution Service

London funds building waste reuse centre

The London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) are investing £0.5m into a social enterprise that will collect unwanted construction materials from building sites and sell them on to the public and trade. The project is to be led by BioRegional who are based in Croydon.

The centre will not be based on selling high value items instead it will focus on saving building materials that would otherwise find their way to landfill sites or, at best, be crushed and re-used as aggregates. The centre will also include surplus materials which have come from building sites but never used.

James Cleverly, chair of the London Waste and Recycling Board said: "Last year London created a massive 9.7million tonnes of construction and demolition waste. Around half of this was recycled but there is still much more we need to do to tackle the rest which largely ends up dumped in landfill sites. This innovative project ticks all our boxes - reusing waste, cutting emissions and bringing jobs and real social benefits to the capital."

Construction companies wanting to donate their waste a worthy cause can contact the centre at jonathan.essex@bioregional.com

edie

Italy adopts USA's LEED scheme

Italy
The GBC Italia and the US Green Building Council have signed a memorandum of understanding to create a partnership between the two organisations. Italy are the first European country to adopt the USA's LEED green building standards rating scheme.

President of GBC Italia, Mario Zoccatelli said, "LEED has been very successful in the US in transforming the approach to building design, construction and operation. After reviewing all of the existing green building tools out there, we ultimately chose LEED because of USGBC's history of innovation and its flexible approach."

edie

Brighton gets European funding to start policing of SWMPs

Brighton, UK
Jonathan Essex of BioRegional said, "I think this is a first - a local authority actually planning to start inspecting SWMPs - and this would help compliance, which in turn could help a focus on reuse on both construction and demolition sites."

Brighton and Hove City Council together with SECBE will be visiting construction sites in Brighton area later this year, starting in June, to inspect Site Waste Management Plans (SWMPs). It is a legal obligation for construction companies to comply with SWMP legislation.

A Site Waste Management Plan is required for all projects with a value of £300,000 and greater.

'In Brighton and Hove, Caroline Lucas MEP of the Greens won the European elections in 2009. A poll in Dec 2009 put the Greens in Brighton Pavilion on 35% of the vote, 8% ahead of the Tories with Ms Lucas running as an MP again.'

Prior to site visits SECBE and Brighton will be running a free SWMP training session on 10th May 2010 in Brighton to give companies a fair chance to prepare. This is an opportunity to understand what the legal requirements are and to learn how to build and develop a SWMP. There will be practical exercises to help delegates get to grips with how SWMPs work. There will also be potential access to other free services to help you implement SWMPs in your company.

In order to book your FREE place or for more information, please email Julian Carter on julian@secbe.org.uk or call on 0118 920 7200.

Transformed Liquid Container Trucks Into Mobile Houses

Aristide Antonas a designer from Athens is devising new ways to upcycle existing materials into dwellings. His designs reuse old trucks into apartments that can either remain stationary or stay attached to the truck and be mobile.

"We may be in the Age of Aquarius, but it seems more appropriate to say that we’re entering into the Age of Reuse, and these KEG Apartments are a prime example. Antonas and his collaborator Katerina Koutsogianni envision transforming these abandoned spaces into two-level apartments, vacation homes or even offices," said Bridgette Meinhold from Inhabitat.


Athens, Greece


Inhabitat

NFDC commit to 90 per cent recycling

London UK - AT a meeting in London on 25 March 2010 the National Federation of Demolition Contractors (NFDC) pledged support, with the assistance of BRE (the former Building Research Establishment), to set a new target to recycle 90 per cent of UK non-hazardous demolition waste. This will be reviewed in 2011.

Speaking at the event, Howard Button, NFDC chief executive, said that the target is currently being exceeded by his members, but he expressed concern that it might be less achievable in future because of the increasing levels of composite and complex material to be found in more recently constructed buildings, unless more was incinerated rather than recycled.

The target was one of many set by the UK government in its Strategy for Sustainable Construction produced in 2008.

Above: Strategy for Sustainable Construction June 2008, signed by Shriti Vadera, Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR), Caroline Flint Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG), Margaret Hodge, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Phil Woolas Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Ian Pearson Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS), William Jordan Office of Government Commerce (OGC) Centre for Expertise in Sustainable Procurement, and Mike Davies Chair of the Strategic Forum for Construction.

In 2007 92 per cent of the 32m tonnes of demolition materials were either recycled and used on the site from which they were demolished or sent offsite. In order to meet their new target, NFDC members will need to divert an extra 6m tonnes from landfill by 2012. This should be relatively easy, but it was said at the meeting that there was anecdotal evidence some old industrial and office building owners were finding it cheaper to knock buildings down than pay the rates. This was good for the demolition industry, but not good for meeting targets for carbon emissions. More than one demolition person at the meeting said that there is no demand for reclaimed timber, which was suprising to the reclamation people present.

Mr. Button said that the NFDC will continue to work with other stakeholders to identify and implement solutions to maximise recovery. This will include training, reduction of environmental impacts, research, development and measurement. It was now mandatory for NFDC members to complete an annual return of volumes of materials handled.

During the meeting Salvo agreed to work with the NFDC to encourage more reclamation and reuse, including another Construction Skills Red Card Training Day for reclamation and salvage on CDM demolition sites, the last of which was more than two years ago.

Strategy for Sustainable Construction

The ongoing Aga saga

Following the European Union's insistence on lower sulphur levels in domestic kerosine, oil-fired Agas are said to be caking up with soot, and in some cases breaking down completely. This has been heightened in the recent cold weather as people rely on their Aga to heat their homes. “We have to literally drill out the carbon build-up from the burner every six to eight weeks, and relight the Aga,” complains Catherine Lewis, who runs a thatching business in Hertfordshire.

The full extent of the problem became apparent when Peter Anslow, director of the Listed Property Owners Club, sent an email to members asking if they were having the same problems with their Aga as him. “The response has been instant and sizeable. Agas are going out all over the country," he reports.

Fixing the problem does not come cheap but many owners seem prepared to dig deep, rather than abandon their oven: “My Aga has dried out sodden rugs, shivering ducks and damp dogs on numerous occasions,” says architectural salvage dealer Amanda Garrett, from Oxfordshire. “I’m having to get it serviced at least four times a year now, but I’m still prepared to persevere. A true Aga owner never gives up.”

Aga ambassador said "Sometimes, problems can be down to people having their oven serviced by someone who’s not an accredited Aga engineer. Sometimes, too, the Agas can be a little old. After all, a car from the Thirties wouldn’t run on today’s fuel.”

Telegraph

Webinar with Jonathan Essex and Thornton Kay

JONATHAN Essex of BioRegional and Thornton Kay of Salvo Llp will present a Webinar on the 3rd February at 3pm - 3.45pm on Pushing Reuse and the decline in the reclamation of construction materials as recycling has boomed in the past 15 years. It will showcase a number of case studies demonstrating the carbon savings of building material reuse, and recommend government actions and policy changes.

The webinar is being organised by the worldwide 2 Degrees Network whose members aim to prevent the tempearture of the earth from rising by more than 2 degrees by 2100.

To join the webinar please follow the link '2 Degrees: Zero Waste Network' below and click on 'join now'.

2 Degrees: Zero Waste Network

The full text of Pushing Reuse

The webinar presentation should be viewable at any time after the event as well, but the question and answer session will not.

Reuse is the new recycling - government can and should create a new reuse agenda

Sustainable construction experts have published new research showing that the amount of building material being reclaimed has declined and that reclamation is in fact becoming more difficult in the UK. Ironically, over the past two decades, the Government's own policy has been hindering reuse, although they now claim that reclamation and reuse is higher on the agenda.

Pushing Reuse commissioned by BioRegional, and written by Thornton Kay of Salvo Llp, looks directly at this problem.

Jonathan Essex said, "Pushing Reuse clearly shows the benefits that reuse brings over recycling. For example, if we reclaimed 50 percent of reusable construction iron and steel the carbon savings would be equivalent to taking 29,000 cars off the road - and that's for just one material. Yes, reclamation is currently more labour intensive than recycling which makes it more expensive, but it creates green jobs and products that often have a higher value than recycled - for instance reclaimed bricks are worth much more than bricks recycled by being crushed to form recycled aggregate".

The full text of Pushing Reuse

Also see the Webinar on Pushing Reuse on 3 Feburary 2010

IT dumped in developing countries

Computer Weekly claims that IT managers are failing to properly question technology recycling firms, which they employ to dispose of their machines supposedly ethically. Consequently according to reports many thousands of crates of toxic IT waste is reportedly being dumped in developing countries.

"We are finding people saying they have a contract with a refurbishment firm, and this firm has promised it is going to do all sorts of good things," said Adrian Harding, policy advisor at the Environment Agency. "But they never check it. The problem is people are taking things on trust - you would not do that when you are buying the equipment. We want people to take as much interest in their end of life equipment as they do on the procurement side."

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive was introduced to reduce the amount of IT waste being sent to landfill. But Tony Roberts, CEO and founder of re-use charity Computer Aid International, said, "The directive has had the positive effect of increasing awareness around IT environmental issues," he said. "But the most significant growth area has actually been the sham re-use companies. The equipment which we hoped would be diverted for re-use has largely been diverted for commercial resale - both by legitimate organisations, but also by the cowboys who pack it into trucks and send it to Africa and India."


Computer weekly

Reuse before recycling

According to the mantra reuse should come before recycling, however, the reuse industry is often overlooked in favour of recycling. The website Treehugger asks if the Government could help to turn around the decline in the reuse of building materials.

The new report, Pushing Reuse (from BioRegional and Thornon Kay of Salvo) argues that reuse has been traditionally overlooked by policy makers, although it offers greater environmental benefits. It suggests that a reuse champion is needed to advocate reuse and potentially set up an incentive scheme for reuse which gives payment for materials diverted from landfill.

Jonathan Essex, Reclaimed Materials Manager at BioRegional said: "Pushing reuse clearly shows the benefits that reuse brings over recycling. For example, if we reclaimed 50% of reusable iron and steel the carbon savings would be equivalent to taking 29,000 cars off the road - and that's for just two materials. Yes, reclamation is currently more labour intensive than recycling which makes it more expensive, but it creates green jobs and products that often have a higher value than recycled - for instance reclaimed bricks are worth much more than bricks recycled into aggregate"

The full text of Pushing Reuse

Treehugger

Energy efficient buildings: EU lays foundation for buildings of the future but misses towering opportunity to convert buildings of the past

After one year of difficult negotiations with the Council, the European Parliament and the Swedish Presidency reached a political agreement (1) yesterday evening on a text of the energy performance of buildings directive.

Luxembourg Green MEP Claude Turmes commented, "The Greens are very pleased that the EU has laid the foundation for the buildings of the future, but deplore that an opportunity has been missed to boost the renovation of existing structures.

"Our Green concept of "near-zero-energy buildings" has been accepted as the future standard for Europe. After 2020 (2), new buildings will have near zero consumption of energy thanks to requirements to use the latest construction technologies and insulation, with the remaining energy made up from solar and biomass generation. This will spark a green revolution along every link of the chain from architects to construction companies and for every new building, from private home to shopping centre.

"We deplore however that no stringent standards were agreed to renovate existing buildings, which account for 40% of all energy consumption in the EU. The Greens and the European Parliament had called for an ambitious EU building renovation programme to go beyond basic measures and convert inefficient structures into very low energy buildings. This depended on fresh funds from the EU budget to leverage cheap credits for large scale renovation.

Opposition from the EU's newer Member States led Council to reject this initiative. Earlier damage had already by done by Barroso's failure to allocate a single Euro to energy efficiency of buildings in the so-called recovery package. The EU is failing to capitalise on a golden opportunity to create millions of jobs, reduce dependency on energy from beyond its borders and tackle climate change. A better outcome from the negotiations would have definitely led to stronger action. Given that 36% of the EU's CO2 emissions come from the building sector, this would have been a prime area to target to allow the EU to step up its climate commitment from 20% to 30% emissions reductions by 2020."

The Greens

Government reuse campaign

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has recently launched a radio and print advert campaign aimed at promoting the three Rs - waste reduction, reuse and recycling.

The £800,000 initiative, entitled ‘Remember. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle', is being delivered as part of the government's Act On CO2 campaign. Environment secretary Hilary Mr Benn said, "Making better use of everything around us will really help us to tackle the impact our waste has on climate change, and save us money too. That's why our campaign is encouraging everyone to rethink what they might think of as ‘waste' and ‘recycling' - we can all do things like put our old sofa on Freecycle rather than taking it to the dump, or recycle our old mobile if we get a new one."

Although the scheme has been likened to WRAP's long-running Recycle Now campaign, a Defra spokeswoman said, ""It's quite different to Recycle Now which is quite a broad campaign. This is about making better use of everything. We are trying to look at all three Rs - moving it up the waste hierarchy. It complements Recycle Now and is not intended to replace that but moves the debate on."


Letsrecycle

Bunny boiling for biofuel

Stockholm, Sweden

Authorities in Stockholm are giving bunny boiling a whole new meaning. The annual cull of the animals has started already in an aim to control their numbers in the cities parks. However, this year the carcasses are being incinerated to generate heat and power which has sparked outrage in some Swedes.

edie

Salvo calls for architectural salvage trade to lobby their MPs by 30 Oct 09 about a proposed new undemocratic law/rule

Above: Not the right way to save old materials. Reusable bricks, roof slates, wood floorboards, and more, are destroyed by thoughtless and rapid demolition. Careful dismantling saves materials for reuse. [Photo taken from Vale of White Horse District Council demolition page *** - see more about this below

FROM 1987 to 1994 the UK government required local authorities to consider placing a 'salvage clause' on all planning applications and listed building consents where reusable material was likely to arise, requiring that it was reused on site, or sold to a local salvage contractor. This clause in PPG15 (Planning Policy Guidance Note 15) came about partly as a result of my relationship with Chris Patten, the then Tory cabinet minister, who was also my constituency MP.

In 1994 policymakers in the higher echelons of English Heritage rewrote PPG15, which is the bible used by UK local authorities, their listed buildings officers and planning officers, when making decisions about historic buildings. The salvage clause was dropped in the rewrite despite objections from Salvo on behalf of the trade.

The government is now set to produce a new version of PPG15, now called PPS15 (Planning Policy Statement 15) which is out for consultation until 30 October 2009. It can be seen here
PPS15 Consultation

I have drafted my comments (see below) which now need trade support. I would like every salvage dealer to put these points to their local MP so that they can have a voice in the decision. An important issue is that PPS15 is not a law debated in parliament.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Response from the UK reclaimed building materials industry on the consultation for PPS15
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A. Reusable materials arising from demolition and refurbishment need to be saved.

The most valuable material reclaimed from demolished buildings is removed from historic buildings dating from before 1920, and most of these are listed buildings or are in a conservation area, both of which are governed by the Planning Act but in reality controlled by guidance notes for local authorities written by English Heritage.

The old PPG15 prior to 1994 included a recommendation to place salvage conditions on planning consent to alter or demolish historic buildings which would result in the disposal of reusable building material. The salvage condition recommended either reuse of such material on site, or its sale to a specialist reclaimed building materials salvage business.

This clause was deleted when the revised PPG 15 was produced in 1994. Salvo's objection at the time was met with a verbal response by telephone from an employee of English Heritage that there was 'not room' for the clause about salvage conditions in the new PPG 15.

This change in government policy has led to hundreds of millions of tons of old but historic and reusable bricks, stone, ironwork and timber being sent to landfill, or recycled by being melted down, crushed and burned from 1994 to 2009.

The EU 2008 Waste Framework Directive has now been passed in the European Parliament, and must become law in the UK by 2013. It requires member states to reuse as a 'priority order' over recycling, waste to energy and landfill.

The new PPS 15 must reflect the requirements of the EU 2008 Waste Framework Directive by containing positive guidance to planning authorities requiring them to ensure the reclaiming of reusable material for reuse when demolition, alterations, refurbishment or restoration occurs.


B. Confusion of listed building and planning officers is increasing global warming.

Most reclaimed building material is used in the historic environment by private consumers working outside mainstream construction. Much reclaimed material is reused without planning consent being sought or given. When applications for consent are made which include reuse of reclaimed material, planning officers refuse on the basis of their informal opinion, outside any legal or formal structure. We estimate that in half UK applications, or sometimes in every instance in certain authorities, planning officers reject reuse of reclaimed material in historic buildings.

These refused applications, to our knowledge, have never been legally challenged because in order to achieve an overall scheme for a building on a site, applicants have in every case acquiesced and dropped the reuse of reclaimed materials as part of the application.

So government policy to reduce global warming by reuse has not been implemented at a local level, and this has resulted in increased carbon emissions due to new materials having to be manufactured to substitute for reusable old ones. For example, the major brick manufacturers now produce new bricks that look like reclaimed bricks, which can be used in those areas and for those applications where reuse is not allowed by planning officers and listed building officers.

The new PPS 15 must give clear guidance to planning departments which encourages the reuse of reclaimed building material.

The scale of the problem can be seen with bricks. Every year the UK demolishes brick buildings which contain a total of around three billion bricks. Every year the UK currently (2008 BigREc Survey comissioned by Defra) reuses around 300 million old bricks. Every year around 2,700 million bricks are landfilled or crushed.

Significant fossil energy is used to crush the old bricks. Every 12 bricks embodies the energy of a gallon of petrol which is destroyed when bricks are crushed.

The failure to reuse results in additional carbon emissions from new brick manufacture, added to which are increased carbon emissions from the crushing of old bricks.

Similar examples of energy and resource inefficiency exist across the reclaimed building material sector covering a large range of material, for example, from dressed walling stone, to tropical hardwood woodblock flooring, to fine Victorian joinery and staircases.

From Thornton Kay of Salvo Llp
and on behalf of 129 reclamation businesses of the UK salvage trade to whom this has been circulated and approved

PPS15 Consultation

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Please contact your MP about this as soon as possible. The end of the consultation period is 30 October 2009.

Thanks for your attention


*** The following statement is taken from the Vale of White Horse District Council website:
In March 2007 the Vale of White Horse District Council signed up to the Nottingham Declaration on Climate Change. By doing this it pledged to reduce its own carbon emissions and to encourage others to do the same. The declaration sets out that the Council 'acknowledges the increasing impact that climate change will have on our community during the 21st century and commits to tackling the causes and effects of a changing climate on our district'. The document also commits the Council to reducing its own greenhouse gases and to encouraging other businesses and individuals in the Vale to do the same.
The Vale of White Horse District Council is typical of every local authority in the UK. All have signed up to policies which pledge to encourage reuse, but none of them actually do. This is why the government must act.

Hoffman Kilns

KRIS DE DECKER writes about the development of the technology of continuous brick firing in the late 1800s, in the latest online article in Low Tech Magazine. For salvage enthusiasts this mag is great antidote with articles like 'Cargo ships, then and now' and '12 small wind turbines put to the test' or 'How to make everything yourself: online low tech resources'.

Low Tech Magazine: Hoffmann Kilns by Kris De Decker

Tomlin and Essex push reuse case to Defra

London UK - SO it was that Jonathan Essex of Bioregional and I arrived in Whitehall at the offices of DEFRA to take part in the latest consultation to discuss the EU Waste Framework Directive and the Waste Hierarchy.

Sadly, carefully worded thoughts are too dull to catch the popular imagination. Conversley, sensationalist headlines alienate the scientific community and responsible policy makers. So taking the plunge and steering between the two extremes someone had to call for commitment to environmental challenges and demand things change before it is too late. Let me restate that same point. Commitment has to mean confronting awkward and inconvenient truths that may involve disruption to comfortable lives and require significant altered behaviour. Al Gore may have his detractors but the title of his themed environmental crusade addresses the real issue. Will we accept the inconvenience?

Behind the scenes, in the corridors of power in dry committee rooms, argument hardly rages but quietly progresses dealing with the great environmental issues of the day.

Before you lose the will to live I should explain.

The prevailing policy affecting waste and the construction industry is wedded to the obsession of recycling in the name of diversion from landfill. Successive government agencies have each rowed in behind the recycling posture, with Treasury subsidy following and providing reinforcement. Conveniently this approach is easily monitored and
measureable by targets, which gives Ministers the opportunity to claim tangible achievements, whilst actually failing to address the fundamental problem.

Waste is defined and modelled as a pyramid with Reuse (and the unspeakable reclamation) at the top of the narrow pinnacle presiding over the broad base of recyclates and incineration (crushing and burning demolition materials). The reality once more is that we pursue target-driven objectives relentlessly endorsed by tax incentive and gloss over the implicit deception because it is reassuring to believe we are successful as recyclers.

The deception continues in the very language we use and the way we discuss the issues. The Germans call the process of material recovery either upcycling or downcycling to expose the truth of the situation. We settle for pretending that recycling is good, whilst actually applying the lowest common denominator approach, and never truly addressing the problem that recycling destroys reusable building materials. Whilst we continue to recycle (crush and burn) we will never achieve the higher recovery of embodied carbon values which would be obtained by driving the emphasise of activity higher up the
waste hierarchy.

If all this seems arcane let me demonstrate the experience of the Olympic Park. The sustainability studies boast 90 percent recovery levels of recycled materials and go immediately into boasting the sustainability credentials of the project. Politicians and the Olympic Delivery Authority instantly congratulated themselves as successful in achieving two core buzz targets - sustainability and recycling. The reality is that traditional demolition teams have mechanically crashed (sorry, reduced) buildings to the ground, sent the concrete and bricks to an onsite crushing facility and segregated the timber and burnable
elements for energy generation via incineration. The embodied carbon saving is minimal but the Government loves the headlines saying they are succesful recyclers. Hardly anything is reclaimed and reused and so the self-deception goes on!

Jonathan Essex and I both made these points at last week's consultation exercise held by DEFRA in Whitehall. The exercise could potentially redefine the waste hierarchy in favour of reclamation over recycling but Defra need much more representation from the salvage industry to confirm that this is what we want, and to balance the almost 100 percent of construction stakeholders who are pushing for recycling over reuse.

Get your views off quickly to DEFRA whilst the door is open and before it can be diluted by vested interests that pursue profit before social and environmental considerations.

More shortly, Steve Tomlin.
Masco, Gloucestershire


See the Defra waste hierarchy consultation website here
Email your response to wfdu@defra.gsi.gov.uk
We would be grateful if you would also please send a copy to thornton2@salvoweb.com so that we can see how many representations are made by the trade.

Tory frontbench signs up to 10:10 climate change campaign

Organisers of the 10:10 campaign said, "More than 8,000 individuals have signed up to the campaign. Some 270 businesses, including law firm Pinsent Masons, Reed Recruitment, Ocado and Oracle, and four major power companies, have so far pledged their support, as well as nine councils, 42 schools and 125 other organisations, such as the thinktank Demos."

As politicians embrace the campaign the conservative party have pledged that their entire frontbench would sign up. The shadow energy secretary, Greg Clark, said, "Conservatives strongly support this campaign. Once again it shows how voluntary action can show the way, proving that a low-carbon future is an essential, achievable and urgent priority."

Energy and climate secretary Ed Miliband said at the 10:10 launch event at Tate Modern, "I pledged to cut my personal carbon footprint and the emissions from my department's headquarters by 10% in 2010."

The Green party said it would encourage its members to join up to the 10:10 campaign, and could table an emergency resolution to its conference on the subject. Caroline Lucas, the leader of the party, said: "I would encourage all Green party members to commit to this, bearing in mind that most Greens will have been striving to reduce their carbon footprints anyway, and for many people the next steps towards, for example, carbon-neutral housing, would need to be facilitated by a package of government grants, subsidies and feed-in tariffs."

The Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "The government welcomes the national 10:10 campaign. By signing up … we hope people will send a broader message to governments round the world."

Guardian

Urban sprawl repair kit

Reburbia; A suburban design competition

Galina Tahchieva has designed an urban sprawl repair kit with the intention of repairing the urban fabric. The design discourages demolitions of existing buildings and encourages re-purposing, often taking advantage of Suburbia's typically excessive setbacks and parking lots. This set of simple infill techniques represents a sprawl repair toolkit to retrofit the 5 building prototypes that define Suburbia.

Galina Tahchieva said, "A drive-through restaurant pad becomes part of a main street, but largely concealed from it, with perimeter liner buildings added along the edges of its parking lot. A strip center is converted into a recycling center with a green roof and 2 side-wings with solar panels framing a courtyard that reaches to the sidewalk. A gas station remains in place while growing a two-story corner store-office extension at a busy intersection to help screen it. A suburban ranch house is permitted to utilize its deep front yard to add a wing with additional bedrooms, a home office, or a rental outbuilding that creates a courtyard with the existing home and defines a livelier street frontage at the sidewalk. Even the ubiquitous McMansion can be converted into senior housing when a five-bedroom/ three-car garage home yields a 10 room-9 bathroom facility for seniors and a caretaker."


Reburbia

10 Tips for Complying with the Code for Sustainable Home

Whilst much of the housing industry has become familiar with the Code for Sustainable Homes rating, the 300-page Technical Guide can still present a daunting prospect.
The Code Simply Explained, produced by experts from BRE and NHBC, has been produced as a handy guide to help developers, builders and contractors comply with the Code and achieve a good score in a practical and cost-effective manner.

Below are ten top tips from the NHBC Foundation for climbing up the Code rating system, adapted from The Code Simply Explained;

1. Start early
At a very early stage, before the site layout has been finalised, start to consider Code-related issues. Particularly mandatory requirements which must be implemented in full to achieve any Code level rating in many cases. But credits may be achieved more easily for issues such as energy, daylighting, and ecology amongst others if measures are integrated into the design now, for example by orientating roofs and living spaces to the south to make best use of solar energy. Seek advice from a qualified Code assessor to ensure that the criteria have been correctly understood.

2. Target easy-win credits
Several credits can be achieved through measures which are independent of the design and achievable in all developments. This includes simple measures such as energy-efficient light fittings and a drying line, and will be cost-effective to specify in most developments.

3. Enhance ecology and reduce flood risk
By taking site factors such as flood risk and ecological values into account at an early stage, the baseline for the Code score can be assessed. Sites of high ecological value or with a risk of flooding are likely to increase the cost of achieving a high Code rating, so this needs to be considered. An ecological survey following Code guidelines will still be worthwhile to improve the score for most sites, both Greenfield and previously developed.

4. Effective construction and supply chain management
Implementing measures relating to the construction stage such as monitoring of energy and water use and reducing pollution risk can be a cost-effective way to improve your score, but requires preparation in advance of starting on site so that procedures are in place and the workforce are aware of them. In particular, a Site Waste Management Plan is a mandatory requirement so must be given early consideration. Modern Methods of Construction using offsite construction can help make this process easier.

5. Reduce water consumption in the planning stages
Early attention to Sustainable Drainage Systems (SUDs) can be cost-effective and potentially provide amenity value through the use of water features such as ponds. The mandatory requirement to reduce runoff volumes, and not just peak run off rates, is an important one to get right, necessitating full consideration of infiltration and rainwater harvesting opportunities. Rainwater harvesting can contribute to reducing surface water runoff and reduce internal water use, but this needs very careful design to meet the requirements of both.

6. Plan the layout to give the space you need
Considering the site layout from an early stage gives the best opportunity to include space requirements for highly weighted Lifetime Homes credits, and a design that enables direct access to rear gardens means that garden sheds can be used for cycle storage. An option for a room-in-the-roof means that an extra credit can be gained to improve the score later on, if this proves to be the preferred strategy.

7. Consider the environmental impact of your materials
Looking at the proposed building materials early means that most types of constructions can perform well – there are many equivalent products with lower environmental impact but equally fit for purpose. There is a mandatory requirement for ratings against the Green Guide so a strategy to achieve that is vital.

8. Ensure your house is Secured By Design
Incorporate the recommendations of a police architectural liaison officer or crime prevention design officer to meet Part 2 of the Secured By Design award is a straightforward way to gain extra credits

9. Insulate to improve performance and reduce consumption
Designing the building fabric to achieve a good sound performance and air tightness and to avoid thermal bridges requires many of the same principles and can help achieve credits in several different areas. Building fabric with a high thermal performance will help to reduce carbon emissions and provide benefits to residents for the full lifetime of the building,

10. Employ strategies to enhance energy sources
Ensure a strategy is in place for low and zero carbon energy technologies, such as renewables and CHP. Most developments will need these technologies to meet Code Level 3 or higher, and the mandatory requirements for carbon dioxide emissions can be very expensive or impractical to achieve unless their integration is planned from the start.


Code for Sustainable Homes