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  • HPH374: Building for People – with Mike Eliason

    HPH374: Building for People – with Mike Eliason

    Mike Eliason talks about his book, Building for People, and the massive opportunity we have to create better places through being more intentional and thoughtful.

    Mike Eliason (photo credit Heather Eliason)

    Interview with Mike Eliason

    Mike Eliason is a researcher, writer, urbanist and architect. He is also the founder and principal of Larch Lab, a socially responsible firm working at the intersection of the climate and housing crises. Based in Seattle, Mike is the author of Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-carbon Communities.

    A year working in Germany laid a foundation for Mike’s career

    Based in Freiburg, Mike was part of a wide variety of projects: detached houses, multi-family housing, some public work, some laboratory work. He lived in a suburb that was heavily pedestrianised, and which he describes as, “the quietest place I’ve ever lived.” And he got to know the districts of Vauban and Rieselfeld, where self-build, multi-family housing, Passivhaus and mass timber construction were all present.

    The concept of Baugruppen (“group build”; involving residents in decisions to foster community) was also well underway. Even though Mike was not absorbing these ideas fully, he felt a desire to take them back to the USA. Many of those memories have come to the forefront for him in the years since – and the ideas are finally starting to become more mainstream, two decades after he was first exposed to them.

    New development needs a rethink to shift its priorities

    Mike’s work started by advocating for better multi-family housing, similar to what he found in Germany. That connected him with a broad network of advocates and politicians who want to achieve better housing and public developments. But they don’t have resources they can show to elected officials and say, “This is how things can be different.”

    The book aims to ‘formalise’ what good looks like, and support advocacy work by adding to the broader discussion of how development in the USA needs a fundamental rethink to prioritise public health, community, affordability and sustainability.

    He sees the problem playing out in Seattle, where transit infrastructure is being redeveloped without open space, without affordable housing, and without features to mitigate the urban heat island effect or deal with storm deluges.

    Housing in the USA is not fit for purpose

    There is little variation in housing, with no real breadth of options between townhouses and large multi-family apartment buildings. Compared to the rest of the world, Mike describes the USA and Canada as “an anomaly” in this regard.

    He believes that often it’s like living in a hotel: corridors down the middle of large buildings, with units either side. The units are really deep with a window at only one end (“like living in a bowling alley”), unless you’re fortunate and live on a corner. The buildings are not climate adaptive – there’s no opportunity for cross-ventilation, and solar protection is not a common feature.

    The units tend to be large, which makes them unaffordable, but with only enough space to fit two bedrooms. If the designs tried to accommodate a third bedroom, it would have no window. “Really, they’re designed for roommates rather than families,” says Mike.

    Floor plan for Larix, a proposed six story Point Access Block, allowing for family-sized homes, units that cross ventilate, and bedrooms positioned on the quiet side of the building (Credit: Michael Eliason/Larch Lab)

    Achieving better outcomes starts with a better vocabulary

    Mike describes the lexicon that people have for talking about housing and buildings in the USA as “stunted.” Feedback about his book often centres on how it has opened the reader’s eyes to certain concepts, which he attributes to expanding the vocabulary people can draw on in those conversations.

    In structuring the book, Mike pulled together concepts he was already researching and writing about, in a way that tried to make sense of them all. That led him to including topics like low carbon housing, eco district design, human centred places, and nature and open space.

    Proving concepts can start with a single home

    While the aspiration is to apply the concepts to large developments and entire districts, they can be just as readily pulled together in a single development – even just one house.

    Development in the USA is antithetical to outcomes like being community-oriented, being adaptable and climate resilient, and providing comfort and protection. While that remains the case, it’s important to highlight the differences compared to European housing as a way to explain why the outcomes are so different.

    Passivhaus and mass timber have demonstrated that change can happen

    People in North America talked about Passivhaus for years. But until there was a tangible project to use as an example for politicians, architects and developers, it was hard to show why it was better than the status quo. Mike has experienced the same with mass timber, for which he is a big advocate. Now mass timber projects have been constructed, others can see and feel the difference.

    Freiburg’s car-light Vauban ecodistrict is filled with numerous Baugruppen (photo credit: Payton Chung)

    Ecology, affordability and community are at the heart of eco districts

    The concept of an eco district is about developing places where people can live a low carbon lifestyle and thrive. Often, they are developed on brownfield sites (Vauban was a former military base, for example).

    At its simplest, an eco district is a place where you don’t need to drive to accomplish daily tasks – they are walkable and bikeable, with low-traffic streets. They prioritise green and open space, there is more opportunity for community, and they are low stress. “Imagine an entire neighbourhood that isn’t prioritising the car?” says Mike. “It doesn’t really exist in much of the USA.”

    Another common feature is a higher level of affordability, to create a good social and economic mix. In the USA, there are token affordable housing projects but it is mostly market-rate housing.

    US arterials and highways are the types of streets where dense affordable housing is legal (photo credit: Michael Eliason)

    Planning around cars is not conducive to people-friendly places

    Often, developers in North American cities will just build parking because they think it’s what the market requires. Even transit-oriented development contributes to the problem. Districts then become very car-centric, and public health, open space, nature and community are not priorities.

    There is some connection between reducing the number of cars and enabling places to be a little better, but it’s quite a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario. Mike feels it needs a developer to say they want to do a district with no cars, then prove that the model for a car-light place is possible.

    One developer in the USA, Culdesac, is building multi-family developments that don’t require parking. Instead, they provide spaces for the community to walk in – pedestrianised streets or alleys, places where cafes can spill out, where community events can be held, or you can just run into your neighbours. It’s harkening back to a way of life before cars became the overwhelming mode of transportation.

    Creativity should be at the heart of regulations

    Regulations can either be written more creatively, so they permit or incentivise new ideas rather than block them. Or they can be written in a way that encourages people to respond to them more creatively. Mike sees this creativity as essential.

    “If we’re just pumping out the same thing over and over again … okay, we know how to do it, and we can maybe do it well, but it might not be the right thing for somebody else. We need places that offer more variability.”

    In the USA, for example, most cities have residential zoning that only allows detached houses. Multi-family housing is impossible, because it’s illegal! By contrast, Brussels has a regulation requiring Passivhaus, and provided incentives and support before the requirement became effective. And France has a 50% bio materials mandate for new construction, which is driving more straw panel and mass timber buildings.

    There are so many solutions to improving housing affordability

    The Netherlands does small districts of self-build housing with around 15 to 30 lots. The cost of infrastructure and management is lower because they’re paying the city rather than a developer, and the city is not seeking a profit. The houses are all designed and built by different people and, in Mike’s words, “the neighbourhoods are amazing. They’re incredible. We should be doing more of that in the USA.”

    The Baugruppen model is a hybrid between market-rate development and cooperatives or even social housing.

    Mike is a fan of cooperatives, especially the Swiss model for them. It uses a cost-based rent that has created some of “the most fascinating and innovative housing” that he has ever seen.

    The Mietshäuser Syndikat – the rental house syndicate – came out of Freiburg while Mike was living there. An umbrella organisation effectively co-buys multi-family property with the tenants and owns it in common. The building then can’t be sold without everyone coming to an agreement, because it’s a 51/49 ownership split. Everything is managed by the residents, who contribute to a solidarity fund to help grow the organisation and help other entities develop projects.

    However, the lack of variability in the USA – with very little public housing, cohousing or cooperatives – means it’s going to take a lot of support to grow that ecosystem.

    Operable exterior shutters prevent unwanted solar gain in summer, and provide additional privacy year round (photo credit: Michael Eliason)

    Housing that responds to climate change is essential

    Understanding the impacts of a changing climate is essential. How do we deal with the sun and overheating? Wildfires and smoke? Rain and floods. For this reason, Passivhaus is the starting point for any project that Mike works on. He loves Passivhaus because it’s comfortable and balances high tech and low tech. If you need heating or cooling, it’s the smallest amount possible.

    Gaskets and tape help to keep out cold drafts, moisture, and wildfire smoke.  (Photo credit: 475 High Performance Building Supply)

    More rain will lead to more mould in properties, and Passivhaus de-risks mould to a greater extent. In extremes of heat and cold when you lose power and can’t run cooling or heating systems, Passivhaus increases survivability. Mike cites studies in the USA where buildings designed to the minimum standard of regulations were only habitable in a deep freeze situation for half a day at most. After that, pipes started to burst. Whereas a Passivhaus was relatively warm and habitable for several days.

    The climate is an issue whether you live in a bespoke, detached house, or a multi-family building. All of these things are going to affect people, so understanding the most optimal ways to adapt or mitigate the effects is really crucial.

    A people-first street in Vienna’s Seestadt (photo credit: Lukasz Karnas)

    Better housing can also help to address social isolation

    The IPCC has previously talked about the benefits of cohousing and other forms of community-oriented housing. It’s not just that you know everybody in your building, though that day-to-day social connection is important. If you’re also designing a building together then you have similar values and things that you’re prioritising.

    There’s a fundamental difference between developing huge, anonymous buildings with 200 or 300 units and smaller buildings. It’s easier to know people and easier to ensure that people are okay if there’s a climate event. Many people who died in the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest were elderly residents who didn’t have a social network, who didn’t have people who could check on them.

    We don’t need to reinvent the future

    We already have what we need to create better places. Active solar protection, Passivhaus buildings, low carbon construction all exist in the world. Mike’s message is that, “we can use our imagination to reconfigure them to the condition, spaces or places that we would like, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everything that we need to build low carbon places already exists. We just have to really prioritise them.”

    There’s a huge network of people who already know how to do so many of these things, who talk about different ways of building and living. Finding ways to tap into each other’s knowledge and experience is crucial. Then, we can start to change the status quo bias, and the attitude of, ‘things have been this way forever, so why change it?’ By spreading the knowledge about what is possible, we can provide shelter that is moderately affordable, so that, as a society, we can stay connected and stay in the community.

    Find out more

    Larch Lab

    Mike Eliason on LinkedIn

    Buy Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-carbon Communities

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of this episode.

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  • HPH355: The Story of Upfront Carbon – with Lloyd Alter

    HPH355: The Story of Upfront Carbon – with Lloyd Alter

    Lloyd Alter explains the term upfront carbon, its relevance to us all as consumers, and why he felt compelled to write a book on the topic.

    Interview with Lloyd Alter

    In 2021, Lloyd released his book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, where he attempted to limit his carbon emissions in line with what climate scientists say would be needed to keep within 1.5 degrees of global warming. Lloyd took on this challenge just as the Covid-19 pandemic struck and therefore it might have been slightly easier than normal because big emission activities such as flying were restricted. After completing a year living within this carbon budget, Lloyd stopped carbon counting. Habits that stuck include eating more vegetarian meals each week, using his e-bike instead of his car as much as possible, and not buying gadgets on a whim. The trickiest part for him has been air travel and he has taken a few flights since.

    After examining the power of our personal choices Lloyd’s latest release focuses on our obsession with stuff! In his new book, The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a Life of Just Enough Offers a Way Out of the Climate Crisis, Lloyd explores the carbon emissions linked to everything we purchase as consumers.

    “If you buy a car you’re buying 14 tonnes of upfront carbon emissions, the emissions of making that car. Everything you buy has these issues and people would talk about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. But efficiency is pointless without sufficiency.”

    What is upfront carbon?

    When it comes to producing products a common phrase used to describe carbon emissions (or greenhouse gas equivalent emissions) is ’embodied carbon’. However, the word embodied is misleading in this context as it seems like it is describing a positive process of carbon sequestration rather than a harmful process of emissions. Lloyd, alongside Elrond Burrell and Jorg Chapa started thinking if it could be described more accurately and came up with ‘upfront carbon’. This term clearly highlights to the consumer what the carbon cost has been to create a product up until the point of purchase.

    Upfront carbon refers to the first 5 stages of the life cycle (production and construction) from A1 to A5 which goes from the mining of materials right up to the use stage. It can be difficult to find accurate information within different aspects of the supply chain which makes most calculations an estimate rather than a certainty. Lloyd highlights that in spite of this uncertainty, it is always a good idea to use as little resources as possible as this will reduce the upfront carbon. It is also important to focus on items that use less processed materials because the upfront carbon will be significantly lower, so a wooden pencil rather than a metal mechanical one, or straw insulation over foam.

    “The ultimate thing is just how much of everything are we using”

    Upfront carbon is a good place to start but can’t be the end

    Upfront carbon tells us a story about the production process of that object and can highlight the impact that the mere existence of the product has on our planet. However, with many of the things we buy, we will also generate carbon emissions when we use or maintain them. The easiest example of this is a car, which comes with approximately 14 tonnes of upfront carbon, but if that car has a petrol engine with poor fuel efficiency, the carbon emissions will be ongoing. It is therefore important to be looking at both the upfront carbon and the entire lifecycle of the product, in order to understand its impact and determine whether it is worth purchasing in the first place and how best to manage it.

    “I had a student who actually analysed a pencil for her class. It was a brilliant, brilliant examination because the Staedtler pencil was made in Nuremberg, from clay from Pennsylvania and graphite from Turkey and cedar from California. And all of these things came together in a pencil in Nuremberg, which was shipped to the store in Aurora, Ontario, North of Toronto. But the carbon emissions from her driving to the store and bringing it home were twice as big as the whole manufacture of the pencil and shipping everything all over the world.”

    Buy good quality things and maintain them for as long as possible

    Every time you buy something new it comes with upfront carbon. Every year you can make that product last, you are amortising that upfront carbon over a longer period and it will be getting less and less. Lloyd highlights this as the simplest method for reducing your carbon emissions and by breaking that consumerist mindset, you will be taking a large step towards a more sustainable lifestyle.

    Use materials that have been processed less

    Lloyd highlights that another way to ensure you are reducing your upfront carbon is to use natural materials where possible. The majority of building products that have been highly processed will have extremely high upfront carbon, items like foam insulation or concrete. Lloyd uses an example from Steve Webb:

    “He said, how do you make concrete? You take limestone, you grind it up into a powder, you put it in a kiln at 1450°C. You then mix it with a bit of clay and aggregate to make what is basically artificial stone. So if I go to a quarry, cut out the limestone, cut it into blocks, drill a hole and put a cable through it as reinforcement, I can make a beam out of stone that is stronger than the beam out of concrete with a 10th of the upfront carbon emissions and it will last five times as long. I said why aren’t we doing this? Making concrete is perverse.”

    Constructing Old Holloway with EcoCocon panels

    Simpler designs will use less

    Minimally processed materials must be used in the most efficient way and all while keeping a check on the scale of things. Lloyd indicates that there is often a misconception that if wood sequesters carbon, then using as much as possible can only be a good thing. However, this negates the fact that wood is a precious resource and whilst it is a great natural building material with low upfront carbon, it should be used as efficiently as possible within the structure.

    While much of the design world ignores the wisdom of optimising, the path is clear. For example, for larger timber buildings they would be simple and boxy, and limited in height to around 6 storeys. The buildings would have flat facades and fairly small windows.

    “We should stop this insane competition to be the tallest wood building in the world. You don’t want to be the tallest wood building, because then the columns are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you’re putting in more and more fibre. And you’ve got to deal with harder fire regulations and all of these things.”

    Finding out accurate information about the upfront carbon can be difficult

    You cannot accurately measure the upfront carbon of wood because every tree is different and unique. The most important thing you can do is make sure you only use FSC certified timber.

    Both high energy efficiency and low upfront carbon must be prioritised

    The construction space can be filled with confusing examples. Many of the first really efficient houses used foam insulations with huge amounts of upfront carbon, so whilst carbon emissions were reduced on a day to day basis, they were significant during construction. An opposing argument has been raised from within the eco build community, where natural building materials with low upfront carbon have been prioritised whilst the need for energy efficiency has been questioned. Lloyd believes that both must be considered equally to ensure that our homes are as sustainable as possible whilst also providing comfort and security.

    There may be emissions from heat pumps

    The refrigerants used in heat pumps often contain harmful greenhouse gases and so if the heat pump isn’t installed correctly they may leak. There are now some heat pumps that claim to use ‘natural’ refrigerants but in reality they are still fossil fuels, just natural gasses rather than fluorocarbons. The ‘natural’ heat pump is a much less harmful version and should definitely be prioritised where possible, but it is not necessarily emission free. Because of this nuance, once again, it is important that the spaces we are designing are modest to ensure that we can keep the size of our heat pump down and therefore reduce the associated emissions.

    Copyright by Evelyne Bouchard

    We need to design with grid intermittency in mind

    Lloyd highlights that there is a growing need to design buildings with future grid intermittency in mind. This would include low carbon, well insulated and efficient shells in order to maintain indoor temperature in the possibility of power cuts. With a need to move towards more and more renewable energy sources, it is important that we anticipate the potential issues that could arise and plan around them. Lloyd highlighted a potential to connect up car batteries to houses in order to utilise each of our resources to the max.

    “The thing about this new world we’re getting into where we’re relying on renewables for everything is that renewables are intermittent… We have to design our houses to be really, really efficient so that if the heat goes off for an hour, and the hot water heater goes off, you don’t notice it.”

    Cultural shifts can cause a ripple effect that increases our carbon emissions

    Lloyd uses the example of the hamburger as a cultural ripple effect. The rise of fast food and drive thrus has created a culture around eating inside our cars. As a result car manufacturers began to add in features such as tray tables and cup holders to make this experience easier for the consumer. As years go by, these features increase and the overall size of cars increase too as a response to the amount of time we are spending in them. All of these increases go far beyond sufficiency and enter the world of excess, where every extra feature and every extra inch of space is adding to the upfront carbon of the car. This is a great example of how our cultural and consumerist influences cause these ripple effects that amplify our impact on the climate at every stage.

    Copyright Looney Tunes

    ‘Visualising’ the carbon may help us grasp its impact

    Lloyd spent a long time deciding on the best metric of measuring upfront carbon and eventually settled on Wile E. Coyote’s biggest threat, an anvil. It can be difficult to grasp the real impact of upfront carbon when it is measured in pounds or kilograms. Therefore being able to say that the production of a Macbook Air took an anvil and a half of carbon or that a watch was half an anvil can be a really valuable image to help people understand the true impacts of their possessions.

    Could a ‘carbon allowance’ be the answer to sufficiency?

    Lloyd suggests that carbon rationing could be a good strategy to help reduce carbon emissions. Everyone would be allowed the same, whether that’s by year or by lifetime, and from there they are free to decide what to spend their allowance on. The idea is that the consumer would be encouraged to reflect on the impacts of the products they buy and the choices they make.

    “So if you’re building lower cost housing, you could maybe say slightly lower standard because it’s small. But if someone wants to build 500 square metres and has the same carbon allowance, they’re going to have to really be careful and they’re going to have to build it to a really high standard. And then if you start saying oh, by the way, you’re only allowed to have this much carbon allowance to build your whole house. Well, then they’re suddenly going to be looking at saying the only way I can build my mansion is if I build it out of straw and hemp on woodpile foundations.”

    Sufficiency, sufficiency, sufficiency: how much do you really need?

    “In this new world of upfront carbon, we have to turn that on its head and start thinking about sufficiency. How much do we need? And this goes through everything. How much clothing do I need? How much food should I be buying? How big is my car? Do I need a car? How big is my house? Everything we do we should look at it. And I often say when you look at the world through the lens of upfront carbon, everything changes. You just start thinking differently about everything you do and everything you buy.”

    Find out more

    Get your copy of The Story of Upfront Carbon

    Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle

    Key decisions that impact on the sustainability of a house build

    Worldwide trends in green design

    Transcript

    Download the transcript of this episode.

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  • HPH293 : What is Passive House Accelerator? – with Zack Semke

    HPH293 : What is Passive House Accelerator? – with Zack Semke

    Zack Semke explains why he’s passionate about facilitating the communication and flow of information around Passive House.

    Interview with Zack Semke

    Zack is based in Seattle, where he works in marketing consulting services for the high-performance building industry. He is also a director of Passive House Accelerator: a website that brings together different sources of information to educate, inform, and promote the work that is being done by the Passive House community.

    The construction industry has lacked innovation

    Compared to other industries, construction has been famously lacking in innovation, but Zack says that Passive House is changing that. By using physics to understand how to design and construct buildings better, Passive House is re-thinking the basics of the skeleton and skin to improve performance.

    The learning from new technologies will drive down costs

    Zack uses the example of solar energy to show how there has been a massive drop in the cost in recent years.

    He attributes this to Wright’s Law and the learning curve effect, which applies to all technologies. It says that for every doubling of units produced, there will be incremental reductions in the costs. This is brought about by the additional learning and micro-innovations that happen across the supply chain. In the case of solar energy, Zack says it looks as though every doubling of solar panels across the world brings about a fall in prices of 30%.

    The same principles can be applied to Passive House buildings, so that costs can be driven down to more of a cost parity with conventional construction.

    There has also been progress in the components supply chain over recent years, with triple glazed windows for example coming down in price.

    And once costs become on a par, it becomes a no-brainer to build Passive House, with all the lower energy and health benefits too.

    “That’s why I’m so passionate about facilitating communication and flow of information between practitioners, policymakers, marketers and whoever it is, because we want to accelerate this process as much as we can so that when a project happens in the UK and there are lessons learned from that project, we can see that learning being applied in Seattle for example.”

    We know what we’re getting with Passive House!

    Zack credits the focus on physics as providing such an important contribution to the sustainability movement. The development of tools like PHPP, which are not too complex or too simplistic to use, mean that there won’t be the performance gap that can be found with other green building standards.

    There will be a wave of uptake

    Zack is encouraged by the explosion of Passive House that is happening across parts of North America, particularly in Vancouver where enlightened public policy is incentivising Passive House and net zero construction, and New York City where carbon emission restrictions on existing buildings are being imposed, paving the way for huge numbers of deep energy retrofits.

    And whereas the Living Building Challenge has been incentivised, it was designed to be exactly what it says – a challenge. Zack says that it doesn’t factor in scalability and is seen as the moon-shot of green building. Passive House on the other hand is set up to be cost optimised.

    “As cities become actually serious about delivering on climate goals, they’ll recognise that there is no other green building standard or approach that rivals Passive House on reducing operational carbon emissions.”

    He gives the example of affordable multi-family buildings in Pennsylvania. The body that oversees the funding, the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, has prioritised Passive House in their scoring for projects that are looking for funding. It doesn’t cost the state anything to add that as a priority, and the result is that developers know if they include Passive House in their schemes they will be at greater chance of securing funding against competitors. This has seen a wave of Passive House construction of affordable housing in the state.

    Pax Futura Passive House apartment building in Seattle. An example of the kind of urban infill, multi-family Passive House building that we will need to see more of in order to address the climate crisis.
    Image Copyright Cascade Built

    Embodied carbon is a challenge we have to address

    “Operational carbon is the first thing that we need to tackle in my view, but just like so many things in the climate action space, it’s not an either/or conversation.”

    Zack credits the Living Building Challenge for the new zero carbon certification, which is one of the first to consider how to reduce and offset embodied carbon.

    He says the Passive House community is embracing embodied carbon as a challenge, and the Passivhaus Institute is dedicating resources to its research and thinking about tools for how it could be addressed. He would be keen to see them including energy-related embodied carbon calculations and looking at the implications of those decisions.

    The Passive House Accelerator shares information and innovation

    Created just over a year ago, the Passive House Accelerator is an open source global platform, that is partly a place that shares content that others have created about Passive House. They also host virtual weekly presentations by Passive House experts, followed by Q&A sessions on screen.

    In addition, they present a podcast, and host roundtable discussions, on a variety of related topics.

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Passive House Accelerator

    Follow Zack on Twitter

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Zack Semke.

    Climate Champions Podcast

    Hattie Hartman, Sustainability Editor at the Architects’ Journal, has launched a new podcast with architect George Morgan from One Point Five Architecture.

    It aims to share knowledge in an era of climate emergency, speaking to change-makers and innovators who are transforming architecture as we know it by designing in ways that respect planetary boundaries

    Find out more.

    Please connect with me

    Subscribe, rate and review the podcast in iTunes

    Rate and review the podcast on Stitcher

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  • HPH263 :A step-by-step EnerPHit retrofit of a mid-terrace home – with Harry Paticas from Arboreal Architecture

    HPH263 :A step-by-step EnerPHit retrofit of a mid-terrace home – with Harry Paticas from Arboreal Architecture

    Harry Paticas of Arboreal Architecture explains why care and hard work have been so important to the retrofit of his 1978 mid-terrace townhouse.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    Interview with Harry Paticas

    Harry has a background in art and maths, which he then followed with a degree in architecture. He says the turning point in his twelve years in practice as Arboreal Architecture was taking the Passivhaus training course and suddenly being able to understand how buildings perform.

    Together with his interest in building performance and the natural world, he also has a passion for retrofit, and is currently getting towards the halfway point of a phased retrofit of his own house, a project which was overall winner at the inaugural ASBP Awards 2019.

    “When you put passion in, you get something out”

    The house was purchased in 2016 with the aim of doing a retrofit project. Although they had intended on finding something a bit cheaper so they would have more money to spend on the works, this house cost rather more than they had budgeted for which is the reason they are not currently as far along as they had hoped.

    It is a south facing, slightly staggered mid-terrace property. It is a combination of a solid brick and block front wall that is tile clad, while the back wall is brick both sides with a cavity.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    It has been an intensive couple of years working on the house, with every Sunday taken up by long hours of DIY. It has been a massive learning journey which Harry says has also been of benefit professionally.

    Not only has the DIY element of the project been hugely rewarding, but it works in parallel with his professional role where he can now speak even more confidently and knowledgeably to clients. This could be about how the MVHR functions, how often you need to change the filters, how the pipes connect etc. Likewise, it aids with speaking to builders and helping them do a better job, which gains more respect from them in turn.

    The strategy involves four phases

    The first phase involved work being carried out before they moved in. They had sold a property and were renting so that they could get any of the dangerous, dusty and cold work out of the way while living in their rental accommodation. This included asbestos removal from ceilings, airtightness works to the ceiling on the top floor, putting in and taping vapour block boards to each other and to the walls, adding insulation to the loft, making the house secure and weathertight and installing three triple glazed windows.

    Generally the plan has been to work from the top of the house down to the bottom. Following the loft works and triple glazing to the front elevation they added insulation to the walls of those rooms. By this time they were living in the house and noticeably felt the thermal shift during the winter weekend when they added the cork insulation to the walls.

    A key part of the strategy was maintaining good quality ventilation before the MVHR unit was even installed. With the existing leaky double glazing they knew it wouldn’t be a problem, but when they were replaced with the triple glazing they specified night vents. These allow the handle to be put to 45 degrees off the vertical which gives a 3mm opening in the window at the top. This meant they could maintain decent air quality as an interim measure without the need for installing trickle vents.

    By doing lots of monitoring of particulate matter, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, temperature and moisture content, they could use the information to decide whether night vents should be open or not.

    Harry is currently finishing off bits of airtightness work and interior decorating of phase two before working on the next big phase which will be working out where the living space is going to be. The plans they submitted to the Passivhaus Institute had it on the first floor, but they’re now thinking of having it on the ground floor.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    According to their EnerPHit retrofit plan, the next phase is to temporarily insulate the garage door. This will instantly reduce heat loss through the whole of the living room floor, the ground floor hallway and a back wall of the garage. In order to do that they will need to block the door and create a new entrance into the garage.

    Along with insulating the porch and insulation to the bathroom, these will form phase three, with phase four being the ground floor front and back insulation, and insulation to the floor.

    Cork has been used for internal insulation

    Harry was always going to use an insulation material that was from renewable sources. He also wanted something that wouldn’t off-gas but be neutral in terms of air quality.

    His work with Jane Anderson on embodied and sequestered energy in a range of insulation materials has shown that cork actually has lower embodied energy than wood fibre, and is very good on both counts.

    It hasn’t performed as well as hoped in the heat

    While internal temperatures have reached 27 degrees, it hasn’t overheated in the Passivhaus terms of over 20 degrees for 10% of the year. With the new windows they are getting 20% less sun through, but with the cork they’re not getting much effect from decrement delay. They have a medium thermal mass and the top floor doesn’t cool down very quickly because of the blockwork walls and brick party walls.

    Currently being made are three bright yellow sails which can be attached to the front of the house and shade 100% of the top two windows and over 50% of the large living room window. They will provide a low carbon, low tech solution to shading and reducing overheating, and which can be packed away in a bag in the loft when not needed for the rest of the year. They will also be able to judge their effectiveness scientifically as they have installed sensors on the inside and outside of various rooms of both theirs, and their neighbour’s house for comparison.

    It’s also about respecting materials that are already in the building

    The process they have adopted has been to try not to replace something if it actually works quite well.

    “So there’s a little bit more of a lean towards embodied carbon, rather than very demanding interior design aesthetics.”

    This has led to what Harry calls some ‘fun moments’ and to a little bit of variation, which they’re accepting of and saying that’s what this is about, rather than trying to put his architectural stamp on everything and making it as perfect as possible.

    It has been an education for his son

    With Harry’s son soon turning eight, he was keen for him to be involved and remember the experience as much as possible, with a deep understanding of what it is they were doing and why.

    With only a little encouragement at first, his son has been producing a series of A3 posters with images, annotations and diagrams, about cork, airtightness, a thermographic survey, insulation and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    His teacher engaged with the process and has encouraged him to display them in school and do presentations about them to his class.

    A direct result of the school presentations is that Harry is starting a charity or community interest company which will be about retrofitting schools. He will be delivering thermal performance workshops to school children and doing research with them where they look at the fabric of their classrooms and the school and coming up with a retrofit masterplan.

    There have been particularly pleasing elements

    Having never had them before, Harry particularly loves the triple glazed windows, which is an opinion shared by visitors to the house. They are inward opening with a central flying mullion which allows them to open up a whole elevation and achieve very rapid night time cooling.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    Another favourite feature is the MVHR unit. They still open windows when they want, but for general air quality which has been backed up with numerical evidence from their monitoring, it has been particularly pleasing.

    © Agnese Sanvito

    Harry says that working with and getting to know materials has also been lots of fun, particularly with the cork.

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Arboreal Architecture

    Follow Harry Paticas on Twitter

    Support Harry’s petition for zero rate VAT on deep retrofit

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Harry Paticas

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  • HPH262 : Where do you put a low energy Cube micro home? – with Mike Page

    HPH262 : Where do you put a low energy Cube micro home? – with Mike Page

    Dr Mike Page explains how The Cube micro home project developed and why land availability turned out to be a major issue for those that liked the idea of tiny house living.

    University of Hertfordshire Innovation Exhibition

    Interview with Mike Page

    Mike Page has had what could be considered an unconventional background into low energy building. With a degree in engineering he moved into artificial intelligence and a career in cognitive psychology. He sees the engineering and psychology as being compatible for tackling climate change, which he says will need to be as much about changing behaviour as it will about technology.

    The Cube Project demonstrated low energy design

    Mike works at the University of Hertfordshire where he became interested in green building techniques and looking at the psychology of pro-environmental behaviour change. Back in 2008 he proposed a cross-department project looking to build a compact home that had low or zero carbon emissions, but still had modern comforts.

    The idea was to ascertain what the best things to have in a building of any size would be, and then put them into a building of a small size. Using the philosophy that some things have to be shown, and not just explained, they could then take the building around for people to experience for themselves.

    Introducing the low energy elements by design takes away the reliance on people to think about making those changes themselves.

    “So, what you’ve got to do is make it the default so they can almost do nothing else in a house. But you’ve got to make it so that they have their comforts and the sort of quality of life that they want.”

    QB1 attracted lots of interest

    Although not setting out to be a “we want people to live in small spaces” project, they decided on QB1 being a 3 x 3 x 3 metre space in which one or possibly two people could live a comfortable, modern existence but with a minimal environmental impact. Taking it to Edinburgh Science Festival in 2011 brought about lots of interest from people saying they would like a space like that.

    QB2 offered more usable space

    Mike felt QB1 was slightly restricted in that it didn’t have a full sized double bed, or space for more than two people to sit down to eat, so he designed QB2. This was 3 x 4 metres with a 3 metre internal height. It offered a better set of spaces, with a 4 metre long bathroom, a galley kitchen, a full sized double bed, 4-seater table, storage areas and space for a washing machine. There was a full size shower, a 4-burner induction hob, an air source heat pump, fan coil heating and a 32 inch LED TV.

    One of the constraints that Mike gave himself was that he didn’t want anything inside that folded up as that would always be an inconvenience, or have any ladders. So the design rule was that everything always had to be usable.

    Another design rule was that they wouldn’t use technology that was only appropriate to small spaces, because of their wider view of wanting to demonstrate what could be done in a building of any size. It did bring about challenges though of using extractor fans and heat recovery ventilation in such close proximity to the composting toilet!

    QB3 had moving internal walls

    The use of alternate tread stairs to reach the bed in QB2 meant it wasn’t accessible for people with restricted mobility, which led to the design of QB3. This was the same internal volume (6 x 3 x 2.5m) but built all on one level.

    Designer of The Cube Project’s QB3 compact home, Dr Mike Page, University of Hertfordshire, operates the building’s hand-operated rolliing kitchen unit. QB3 at Edinburgh International Science Festival, 2016. For more information, see www.cubeproject.co.uk Photograph: Allan MacDonald

    A key design feature of QB3 was that it had moving internal walls, so you could step out of the kitchen, wind the wall past you and step back onto the same floor which was now in the bathroom. Therefore the light and insulation for one space is also the same that is used for another space.

    “All the people who wanted one were exactly the same set of people who didn’t have land to put it on”

    A company was given the licence to build and sell the Cubes, but despite lots of interest at design shows, the problem of having the land to put it on was an issue.

    Although they were careful to keep the design within the definition of the Caravan Act, because it was a self-contained dwelling it would need planning permission. And if people had land with planning permission then they might just build a normal house and not need a microhouse. Even to be in someone’s back garden, it would need to be as an annex to the house, not as a separate dwelling where someone could live.

    The Cubes differ from the Tiny House movement in the US, which are largely designed to be towed and moved from place to place. While the Cubes meet the Caravan Act and are mobile by definition, in practice they would need to be towed by a lorry. While physically they are tiny spaces, they were meant to be fairly static and not moved around.

    It was also never the intention for people to be living in them in isolation. They had always thought it could be groups of young people living in a community of Cubes around a common space such as an allotment. What has been difficult to make happen is a planning arrangement that would allow groups to come together and create a network of smaller houses.

    Something like a site that has been designated for static caravans would be ideal, where they could create a low energy community.

    “I think it’s more the planning regulations that are conspiring against what we wanted to do with the Cube Project which is to let people live in their own private spaces with groups of other people nearby, in pleasant and low carbon surroundings.”

    Land reform is needed

    Mike doesn’t believe that planning really serves all members of the community, and that land reform is a big issue that needs to be addressed. There are lots of people and companies that own lots of land, with developers holding onto land until the need for housing becomes so desperate they will get planning permission and benefit from the massive increase in land value.

    Issue of zero carbon building

    Mike’s says what we really need are full-sized houses, and that is something he is now concentrating on.

    He is amazed that houses generally being built now are not zero carbon all the time, or at least on average.

    “So, what amazes me is that given that we’re going to have every house that’s got to be zero carbon basically by 2040 – Extinction Rebellion say earlier, the government says slightly later, but let’s say 2040 – why would you build any house in 2019, 2020 that would need retrofitting to meet that standard if you knew that that house was going to stand for sixty, seventy, eighty years? Why would you do that? That seems absurd. And yet just about every house I see being built is not of this type. It’s nowhere near being zero carbon. I simply don’t understand it. That’s a psychological problem.”

    Find out more

    Visit The Cube Project website

    Follow Mike Page on Twitter

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Mike Page.

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  • HPH261 : Reducing construction waste and reusing materials – with Duncan Baker-Brown

    HPH261 : Reducing construction waste and reusing materials – with Duncan Baker-Brown

    Duncan Baker-Brown from BBM Sustainable Design explains how we can reduce waste on our projects, given a little more time and with a different approach on site.

    With the construction industry being such a big contributor of annual waste, he also shares strategies for how we could transform things if we treat buildings as material banks, which are built with deconstruction in mind.

    Interview with Duncan Baker-Brown

    Duncan Baker-Brown and Ian McKay set up BBM Sustainable Design 25 years ago. The company has a passion for finding environmentally friendly solutions to architectural challenges, and carries out research projects to inform his practice, and vice versa. Duncan also teaches at the University of Brighton.

    An area of ‘protected’ rainforest is being mined for its resources

    Reducing consumption is crucial

    The construction industry is a huge consumer of raw materials, accounting for around 50% of those that are mined across the world. The resultant deforestation and destruction is a key reason why Duncan believes we should be trying to consume far less.

    Although on an international level many leaders seem to be ignoring the crisis, Duncan sees hope on a more regional level where groups and states seem to be taking matters into their own hands and making commitments to address climate change.

    “There’s no such thing as waste, it’s just stuff in the wrong place”

    Duncan defines a circular economy as being a world where one area’s waste, is a valuable resource for another area.

    The UK construction industry is responsible for 60% of annual waste

    With 600 million tonnes of things being bought in the UK every year, 200 million tonnes is thrown away. Of that waste, 120 million tonnes comes from the construction industry.

    Traditionally, resources are thrown at a site in order to keep it busy and not have delays while waiting for materials. This means a tendency to over order on materials by around 10% for wastage, resulting in around 10-15% of everything arriving on site being thrown away. With this cumulative effect on site, it means that for every six or seven houses that are built in the UK, one house worth of waste will go to landfill or incineration.

    Instead we should only be ordering the goods that are needed, planning the projects better so there aren’t periods of delay, and value the materials that actually arrive on site.

    We could also be shopping in a much smarter way. BBM do a resource map for their projects where they look within a 10km or so radius of the site and work out what resources might be nearby. That could mean a factory producing something, a woodland that’s managed for timber, or even a building site that is being deconstructed where they can salvage materials.

    “But it takes a different mentality and sensibility. And the big deal is the time to educate yourselves around the potential of a circular economy to provide a better product at the end of the day, and being able to be beneficial to the environment as well.”

    The Waste House

    In 2014, BBM completed the Brighton Waste House, an experimental project that was built by students under the guidance of the university. Initially the aim was to build a high performance house out of the material that normally goes to landfill or incineration. During the design and development stages they partnered Freegle UK, whose founder Cat Fletcher, suggested they raise awareness of the things that are thrown away on a daily basis, not just in the construction industry but in our everyday lives. It changed from being a project that proved construction waste was valuable, to a project that became more of a thought-provoker.

    The house was subsequently designed as almost a container for the waste products: a vessel for holding lots of products that had been designed without an end of life strategy. They used the plastic waste products as low grade insulation, and included 4,000 VHS tapes, and 25,000 toothbrushes (all unused) that were collected in just four days from Gatwick Airport!

    With 90% of the material used being other people’s waste, it performs to around Passivhaus standards.

    While they proved that it can be done, Duncan says it would take an experienced architect or contractor to understand the potential for using second hand material. With issues around insurance and guarantee of second hand materials, at the moment we don’t have the legislation or networks to support everybody doing it easily.

    Duncan certainly isn’t saying we should be using waste plastic in our homes, and if he did the project again he would use a resource map for construction and other materials to make a building that was a material store for the future.

    “What I would like to do is a project where maybe we find a building that is unwanted, and we deconstruct it and then reconstruct it with new owners, new use, new site. And the architectural challenge, apart from the deconstruction and reconstruction, would be how to tweak the building so it accommodates the new criteria – our new standards for insulation and energy production and that sort of stuff.”

    Lendager Group have reused an old brick facade

    Think through how you can limit waste on a self build

    If you’re doing a self build project, the best thing you can do is look to reduce your waste on site to zero. By using a pre-fabricated build system for example, you will only have delivered what you actually need. A further benefit is that things that arrive flat-packed and screwed together, could ultimately one day be unscrewed and reused.

    Avoid using the wet trades as far as possible too. As soon as you start mixing things with water there tends to be far more waste.

    Buildings can be material stores for the future

    On a large scale looking at financial industry buildings, Duncan explains that many are only designed with a business plan of perhaps 25 years, after which time they’re demolished and a new flagship building put in their place.

    He describes a project in Amsterdam by ABN AMRO bank. It’s an £18 million Circle Pavilion project, which has been designed so that when it is deconstructed in however many years time, the materials and components are assets that can be sold off or reused on other projects. As well as making financial sense it will avoid sending all the waste to landfill.

    Duncan sees a future circular economy having two spheres: a biosphere and a techsphere. The biosphere being everything that is made of natural materials that can be reused a number of times before they eventually become compost for the natural world. The techsphere incorporates those things that won’t decompose so will need more work to establish how they can be designed to be deconstructed and used again.

    Corporate responsibility is needed for end of life strategies

    Duncan believes there needs to be corporate responsibility of manufactured items, so when something comes to the end of its life, it becomes the responsibility of the manufacturer, not the end user.

    This fits in with the idea of things being material banks, where at the end of their life they would actually be an asset.

    The idea of lease agreements is gaining traction, particularly in Europe. One example is Philips who provide leased light fittings to buildings. The benefit to the end user is that Philips are likely to be supplying them with their most robust fittings because they don’t want to be repeatedly coming out to change the lightbulbs. And from Philips perspective, at the end of their lifespan they are able to take back the fittings and use the parts to make new ones.

    “And from a design point of view, and that’s whether you’re designing a light fitting or a phone or a building, it needs a different way of designing. You need to think about it differently, because you’re thinking about how to take apart the thing that you’re assembling as you’re designing it.”

    Differences can be made on self build and large construction scales

    On a self build scale, websites like Freecycle and Freegle can be a source of finding, or recycling materials. On a general construction industry level, Duncan says there will need to be changes to the buildings regulations to demand and facilitate reuse of materials.

    While some of the large contractors are already moving surplus materials internally to other projects, Duncan thinks it can only be a couple of years before large contractors will start swapping with each other.

    “I’m trying to communicate a really clear message because a lot of people are going to be crunching carbon numbers etc and trying to be carbon neutral and all that sort of stuff. And I just think that’s really difficult I think to understand how to really do it, and I think it’s a lot more straightforward just to say carbon is one of the things that we’ve got to reduce, but we’ve really got to reduce the amount of water we use, the amount of energy we use and the amount of materials and components that we use when we’re designing, building, inhabiting, maintaining, and ultimately deconstructing the built environment that we live and work and play in.”

    Find out more

    Visit the website of BBM Sustainable Design

    Follow BBM Sustainable Design on Twitter

    Read about more examples in Duncan’s book

    The Re-use Atlas

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Duncan Baker-Brown

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  • HPH254 : Transitioning to an ecological civilisation – with Jeremy Lent

    HPH254 : Transitioning to an ecological civilisation – with Jeremy Lent

    Jeremy Lent, author and integrator, looks at how and why we should transform the fundamental basis of our civilisation.

    Interview with Jeremy Lent

    When Jeremy Lent’s life started unravelling around 15 years ago, he found himself going through a deep crisis of meaning. He had recently taken the internet company that he founded public, but left to care for his wife who had developed serious health problems. Within a couple of years the company had collapsed and his wife passed away. He questioned what he could do with the rest of his life that was truly meaningful, so went through a long process of trying to discover what meaning really is.

    “It was only through putting this kind of jigsaw puzzle together that I began to realise both how this question of meaning has actually driven what cultures have done and got to recognise the absolute crisis – crisis of meaning and crisis of sustainability – our current civilisation is on.”

    There have been very few key transitions in civilisation

    Jeremy explains that there have only really been two or three key transitions that have taken place in the human experience: the whole way in which our day-to-day lives and ways in which we make sense of things have changed.

    For around 95% of our ancestor’s history as humans there was a connection with nature, with it being seen as a giving parent, supporting the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life.

    The first key transition came with the rise of agriculture, ten to twelve thousand years ago. With that emerged ideas like wealth, hierarchy, patriarchy, the ways in which humans specialise into different things, and above all the value of ownership.

    It had been that way until the last few hundred years when, in Europe, there was a scientific revolution which looked at things in a different way. Rather than looking at humans as being connected with nature, came the idea of separation from and conquering of nature.

    And while Jeremy doesn’t want to give the impression that it has been an intrinsically bad thing, as it has given all the advances in science and technology that we all use and are grateful for, it has brought about imbalances.

    “When we think of nature just in this way and that way alone, it’s giving humanity so much power to disrupt nature that we have led to this place now where we’re literally destroying the very Earth that we’re on by seeing it just as this resource to exploit, and by just seeing it as this kind of machine that has no intrinsic value of its own, and by seeing ourselves as separate from it.“

    An ecological civilisation would be life affirming

    Jeremy describes our current civilisation as being a consumer and wealth based economy, that is increasing at an unsustainable rate when you consider how we are destroying the resources on the planet.

    The idea of an ecological civilisation asks the question, what would it look like if we transformed the fundamental basis of our civilisation, from one that’s wealth and exploitation based, to one that is life affirming and life based?

    The principle of an ecology based system is that the dignity and health of each person is required for the civilisation as a whole to be healthy.

    Jeremy also explains the circularity of an ecosystem, where the waste products of any part are actually the nutrition for another part of the system. He thinks our economy can learn from that and build it into our manufacturing, so things are repaired and re-used, rather than being discarded.

    Jeremy explains reciprocity as being where different parts of an ecosystem actually do things that have reciprocal advantages to the other.

    “We can structure a system where what is good for each of us is actually of reciprocal value for others. So, we’re not actually exploiting others and sucking them dry, but actually doing stuff that other people need.

    Build systems for future generations

    Ecologies can last millions of years, and Jeremy suggests using the idea of longevity and applying it to our own thinking. So instead of building systems for the current and perhaps next generation, think of creating them as far as seven generations on or even beyond that. One example could be planting a grove of trees that might take generations to reach maturity and full fruiting.

    We live in a non-linear world

    “Which means you can’t just look at two points in a graph and see that line continuing into the future. In fact, the one thing we know about the way human history works is that non-linearity. Which is both terrifying because the society we’re in right now may collapse – that’s one very non-linear direction – but it may also transform.”

    Jeremy cites historical examples of women’s suffrage and the US civil rights movements, of having brought about incredible change in a relatively small amount of time. He notes the Me Too and Extinction Rebellion movements as similarly making changes to current ways of thinking and bringing about change that didn’t seem possible not too long ago. The kind of thinking that recognises that things can change quickly, and where we should be asking “what can I do to make a difference as part of this transformative change that has to take place?”

    “What’s meaningful are the actual actions we take towards trying to create a hopeful future for those future generations.“

    “That realisation brings with it a tremendous responsibility. Because the very actions we take, this very conversation, or just what each of us does each day in deciding to do one thing or another, sometimes can have effects that are not as dramatic as that which we saw with Greta Thunberg, but oftentimes effects we don’t even know about. We can say something to somebody else, either to a positive or a negative way which they can take, and then see something in a different way which they transfer to somebody else and somebody else gets transformed in their way of thinking, who then goes on to make some major change.

    We might discover that change years later and have no idea that something that you or I did actually had an impact that led to that.

    That gives the sense both of hope and a real sense of responsibility that each of us is involved in this web of life in creating the future that we all care about.”

    The internet could play an integral role

    Jeremy believes that if our civilisation makes it through the current crisis we can look back at the internet as providing such a fundamental shift in the human ability to communicate with each other, that it will be viewed on similar levels as the rise of writing and language.

    He likens it to a human superorganism where we are all truly connected and where the actions that we all do make a difference to the whole system.

    We tend to concentrate nowadays on some of the more negative effects and the incredible inequalities of wealth with the billionaire owners of many of the corporations. But others are working on ways of structuring the internet so that it avoids some of the pitfalls we’ve already seen and can have more of the network effect that has transformed each of our lives.

    It will take a community of millions to make it happen

    While they might wield substantial power to make change happen, Jeremy doesn’t see that these billionaires can lead the way to make an ecological civilisation a reality. They look for market solutions, because the market is what worked for them.

    Rather than solitary heroes it will need to be a community of millions of people, connecting with and caring about each other. Who, rather than saying “I’m the one who’s going to change the world,” says “I’m going to change the lives of the people around me right now.” And with the internet as a kind of connective tissue, these will be the kinds of changes that will lead to a self-organised ecological civilisation.

    “It’s working together with each other, recognising the values that other people have, and just working as a group, seeing that it’s the group dynamic that is more important than any one leader.”

    Instability will expedite change

    With all these instabilities unravelling the current system, the irony is that transformative change will actually happen more quickly than it ever could if the system was stable.

    Jeremy highlights that we are all part of this system, and what we do with out lives, how we raise our children and the ways in which we relate to other people, can really make a difference.

    “The future is not something that’s out there that is separate from us, but each of us are part of creating that future right now in what we do.”

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Jeremy Lent

    Follow Jeremy on Twitter

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  • HPH252 : How to reduce the embodied carbon of your new home – with Chris Magwood

    HPH252 : How to reduce the embodied carbon of your new home – with Chris Magwood

    Chris Magwood, a director at the Endeavour Centre in Canada, explains the importance of embodied carbon and how building with plant-based materials could transform our new homes into carbon sinks.

    Interview with Chris Magwood

    Chris Magwood has been working in sustainable building for the last 25 years. He’s also written several books such as Essential Sustainable Home Design, Essential Prefab Straw Bale Construction and Essential Hempcrete Construction.

    For the last 8 years he’s been teaching at the Endeavour Centre which is a sustainable building school based in Peterborough, Ontario.

    What is embodied carbon?

    Embodied carbon is the total carbon emissions associated with materials through initial harvesting of raw materials and through the entire transportation to manufacturing facility and everything that happens in that manufacturing facility. And then transportation to a job site and the associated emissions with actually doing the installation work on the job site.

    Carbon dioxide is an expression of all greenhouse gases

    As carbon dioxide is not the only greenhouse gas, other emissions are translated into a carbon dioxide equivalent.

    Chris says: “The expression that we use in the calculations is CO2-E – so, carbon dioxide equivalent. So, if it’s carbon dioxide, one molecule equals one. But if it’s methane, one molecule would equal twenty-five or whatever the number happens to be.”

    Energy isn’t necessarily a proxy for carbon

    For a long time the term that was being used was embodied energy, but it’s important to realise that energy isn’t necessarily a proxy for carbon.

    So, two factories could use the same amount of energy, but if one is all solar and one is all coal powered, then the emissions profile of the two would be very different.

    Even though in embodied energy terms, that number might look the same. So, this is specifically trying to make emissions the focus and not just energy use.

    The carbon footprint of building materials vary drastically

    While we probably understand that different building materials have different carbon footprints, when Chris crunched the numbers he was surprised by the extremes.

    Chris comments: “I was pretty stunned at the results in that some things just had such a huge carbon footprint and I had never really considered that impact being so big before. And then some things were miniscule.”

    Plant based materials give us the opportunity to turn our buildings into carbon sinks

    As plants grow they pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and release oxygen. Effectively they put the carbon into their physical structure.

    So if you’re building with a material that has atmosphere carbon stored in it – basically any plant material – in terms of the calculations, it’s a negative emission. In other words there’s a drawdown of carbon rather than an emission.

    “Building with a lot more plant material, we could not only reduce that carbon footprint to zero, we could actually take it into the negative numbers and make drawdown buildings that are in their way drawing down climate change rather than contributing to it.”

    Straw is one of the best materials

    Chris compares two plant-based materials as an example of how even a little processing can increase the embodied carbon.

    Although cork requires quite a bit of heat in its manufacture, it still ends up being a net store of carbon.

    Straw, however, has almost no emissions in terms of the harvesting and manufacturing. It’s also the waste product of an annually renewable crop. And in the case of grain straws, the carbon in the stalks would have just returned back to the atmosphere in fairly short order.

    Chris adds: “Even though all of these plants more or less store a similar amount of carbon, the amount of processing energy that’s gone into them does change the net profile.”

    Endeavour class at a straw bale raising
    Six carbon storing insulation materials

    Timber has a more complex picture

    It’s much harder to attribute carbon storage to timber because the carbon that’s in that tree, depending on when the tree was cut, that tree could have gone on drawing down more carbon as a living tree than it does as a stored tree.

    And if you only end up using about half the volume of the tree to make a timber product and the rest of the carbon from that tree ends up back in the atmosphere, you haven’t net stored any carbon. And if you’ve released a whole bunch of carbon from the soil of the forest floor, then it may be worse than a draw down. It might actually cause emissions.

    We could become more intentional about what our buildings are doing

    Chris is not advocating that all buildings need to be entirely plant based, but he does see a massive opportunity to be more intentional.

    “If you can weigh up the carbon storing materials with the carbon emitting materials, you can actually plan a building to land on a target that you’re aiming for, whether that’s carbon neutrality, storage or a slight number of emissions.”

    Environmental product declarations report the environmental profile of a material

    In carrying out this research, Chris used environmental product declarations, an ISO standardised way of reporting on the environmental profile of a material.

    This is third party document where the third party goes in and looks at a manufacturer and traces the entire chain of that product and essentially does a calculation to look at its global warming potential from harvesting of the raw materials through the entire manufacturing process.

    Chris explains how he used this information: “I’m basically using those numbers to then multiple it out on my own buildings. So, if a particular environmental product declaration says there are two kilograms of CO2-E per kilogram of this material, then I figure out how many kilograms of that material are in my building and then I can multiply that out and do that for all of the materials and then total that up and get a net, whether it’s a net emissions or a net storage.”

    Concrete, glass, foam and steel all have high carbon footprints

    Perhaps as one might expect concrete, glass, foam, and steel all have significant carbon footprints associated with them.

    Building a Passivhaus will not necessarily have any impact on embodied carbon

    If you’re building a Passivhaus, then your choice of materials is really important.

    “The way a lot of people will achieve Passivhaus standard here in Ontario, Canada, is they’ll throw a whole bunch of foam insulation at that building. And when I modelled that, the embodied carbon footprint, the upfront emissions of making that building, don’t ever get paid back by the energy reductions. So, if somebody was using that strategy because they thought they were doing something for climate change, they’ve actually done exactly the opposite.

    The carbon profile of the grid varies according to where you live

    This goes back to energy not necessarily being a proxy for carbon.

    Energy efficiency – in terms of carbon emissions – is only useful if you use dirty energy (with a high carbon content).

    “Here in Ontario, we shut down our coal plants a few years ago, and so our electrical grid is relatively carbon free. And so, savings in energy efficiency, especially moderate ones, our code is now pretty good in terms of baseline energy efficiency. Going from that to Passivhaus, while it may have good implications for the owner in terms of lower bills and comfort and all that kind of stuff, from a carbon emissions profile, it’s almost meaningless with the difference between a code built house here in Ontario and a Passivhaus in terms of the emissions profile of operating that building, it’s negligible because the carbon profile is so clean on the grid.”

    Canada’s Greenest Home

    Find out more

    Visit the website of the Endeavour Centre

    Visit Chris Magwood’s website

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    Download a transcript of the interview with Chris Magwood.

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  • HPH238 : Making Passive House homes affordable – with Adam Cohen

    HPH238 : Making Passive House homes affordable – with Adam Cohen

    Architect Adam Cohen explains how his modular construction system is making Passive House building simple and affordable.

    Interview with Adam Cohen

    Adam Cohen qualified with a Degree in Architecture from the University of Maryland 35 years ago. He was uninspired by the post-modern approach of the time, and instead was a keen follower of Ken Kern and Michael Reynolds‘ owner-built homes, and of Malcolm Wells‘ earthship movement.

    After qualifying as an architect he set about building healthy homes that used no glues or chemicals, were off-grid, had first generation solar panels and composting toilets that they made themselves. Over the several years that followed he found it a struggle to find clients who wanted to build this way so, out of financial necessity, he started a more traditional company that he ran for 20 years, employing 43 staff where they designed what they built, and built what they designed.

    “I had sold out completely”

    The company was very successful financially but it wasn’t until ten years ago when his 12 year old son started asking questions about carbon footprints and climate change that he says he had a ‘slap in the face moment’. It brought home to him that because it had been hard to find people interested in energy efficiency at the time, that he had given up his principles and was building in an entirely different way.

    That realisation gave Adam a renewed focus to “atone for all these sins. I’ve put a lot of potential carbon in the atmosphere by creating crappy buildings.”

    Finding Pasivhaus in 2008, he became one of the first people in the US to take the training. Spending a month in Europe gaining his international certification and spending time with Passivhaus builders, he returned to the US with a desire to build commercial Passivhaus buildings using a design / build methodology.

    “I realised how fragmented and dysfunctional the design and construction world really was.”

    By 2012 others had started sitting up and taking notice of what Adam and his company were doing, and were keen to seek their assistance to help other teams. However his in-house firm of architects, engineers and builders where everyone was working together, wasn’t the way the process worked elsewhere.

    Adam has made it his mission over the last few years, since selling his business, to try and help the industry move forward. He has recently moved to Canada and is helping Passive Buildings Canada put together an education programme to raise awareness that if you’re building new construction it should be done to a carbon neutral standard.

    “They need to reduce their embodied energy and they need to reduce their operational energy and then they need to offset their carbon with either credits, site generation or local generation of energy.

    We have the choice now to be proactive, or we have the choice later to be reactive.”

    The construction industry needs greater awareness of climate change

    Adam believes that in Canada, unlike the US, the federal, provincial and municipal levels are fairly well aligned in terms of being tuned in to the climate change emergency, however within the construction industry there is still not sufficient awareness from the consumers, owners, producers, architects or builders.

    He sees there being far more awareness in the European design and construction community, and the population generally, but sees the greatest potential being what’s going to happen in China in the next 20 years.

    Adam has written a draft paper called “The Integrated Modular Design Theory for High Performance,” which sees a need to move towards building with modular components that can be put together in different ways, manufactured easily and built efficiently.

    The aim is for cost parity

    Once Adam decided to divert his company’s focus to constructing healthy buildings, he realised this was only going to work if he could make an economic argument for it and get cost parity with the alternatives. In the commercial sector this wasn’t too difficult to achieve, but in residential it has taken a lot longer.

    One of the first steps was to convince people to pay more for the construction of the building, instead of a cheaper building with higher energy bills.

    “Then it became a question of, if you’re going to be paying eleven-hundred dollars a month for energy and mortgage and I can deliver a building that’s more comfortable, that uses less energy, and it’s going to cost eleven-hundred dollars a month or less…. if I could take some of that money that you’re spending on those electrons and put them into your mortgage so that you’re building equity and wealth rather than just spending money, but the net monthly cost is the same, why would you not do it?”

    After three years of mining data they were able to put forward a proposition for single-family homes, where mortgage plus energy is equal to or less with a Passivhaus than you would pay for a standard house. Initially that was hard to achieve as windows had to be imported from Europe and there were very few suitable mechanical systems, but now the US market has options available.

    Paying for an experienced team could save money

    Adam tries to encourage owner-builders who are starting out on the process to create a team of people who have experience in Passivhaus, otherwise they might end up wasting money while they learn, to the cost of the client.

    Adam has created a Lego style of system where owner-builders can buy a kit of pieces that snap together making a Passivhaus envelope very simple. Similar systems exist in the UK where you can buy a guaranteed shell and do the rest yourselves.

    Understand the inter-relation between construction stages

    Adam tries to simplify the thought process for self builders when approaching a new project, by helping them to understand the inter-relation between the different stages of the construction.

    He breaks these down into four ‘buckets’. They are:

    • Site acquisition – how much it is going to cost to buy the site
    • Site development – how much it will cost to clear the site, install utilities, do any groundworks and landscaping
    • The construction – the cost of getting the shell up, enclosed and tested for airtightness and thermal continuity
    • The finishes – interior and exterior finishes, including mechanical and electrical and everything else within the shell.

    He explains that when people have a fixed budget, he makes them understand that money can be moved around those buckets as none are fixed. There is an inter-relation between the site acquisition and site development buckets which need to be balanced, before you know how much there is left for the other two buckets.

    Within each area there will be some costs which are fixed but others where savings can be made, such as with the complexity of the design.

    “So, when you start to create your balance of how do I make all these pieces balance in this budget, I want people to understand that you need to separate out your thinking so that you understand, if I go spend a quarter of my budget on the site and then I spend another quarter of my budget on site development, so I have actually half of my budget to build the building with, is that realistic that I can actually get that building built?”

    “Start with, ‘here’s the system, now let’s design to the system’.”

    Using Adam’s Lego style system of modular construction, he explains how clients often use a free programme like Google Sketchup to help with their design. Rather than people coming up with a design and then trying to make it fit a manufactured system, this way allows clients to use the Sketchup modular blocks that Adam has created, to start their design. The manufactured products help generate an efficient form, leading to an affordable solution.

    Consider the long-term impact

    “I would hope that anybody considering a new build would try to work their way through to figure out how to build that building with the lowest impact possible. Because as a species, it’s critical that each of us make the right decision every day in everything we do, and if you’re building a building that’s going to saddle your grandchildren with ongoing operational energy that’s going to be carbon intensive, you’ve kind of just slapped your grandchildren in the face.

    I know that the millions of square feet where I’ve built really bad buildings, I’m now approaching about a million square feet of Passivhaus buildings. So, not that I’m offsetting them, but at least I’m reducing my impact long-term.

    So, I would encourage all of the individuals listening to this to consider their actions when building a new building, and how it will affect their grandchildren.”

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Build Smart

    Follow Adam Cohen on Twitter

    Check out Adam’s YouTube channel

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Adam Cohen.

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  • HPH158 : Lessons from 40 years at the Centre for Alternative Technology – with Pat Borer

    HPH158 : Lessons from 40 years at the Centre for Alternative Technology – with Pat Borer

    Architect and author Pat Borer shares insights from his teaching career at the Centre for Alternative Technology as well as what he’s learned from his own practice (which has helped hundreds of self-builders).

    Interview with Pat Borer

    Pat Borer is an architect specialising in green architecture, mostly for self-builders. His work at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth began in 1976.

    CAT’s inspirational natural setting helps its cause

    CAT was founded in 1973 by Gerard Morgan-Grenville on the site of an old slate quarry in west Wales. He wanted to create an experimental village of the future to demonstrate there was an alternative to mainstream, industrialised civilisation, both technologically and socially. Demand to visit the centre in its stunning location meant it was soon opened to the public.

    Straw bale theatre

    We should only use our fair share of resources

    The industrialised people of the world use eight times their “fair share”. The energy crisis of the 1970s prompted research into renewables by many, including CAT, although interest in renewable energy has developed hugely and is now generated on a national scale. In 1976, CAT built a super insulated house that used less energy than a passive house.

    Photovoltaic technology hasn’t changed much but the scale of manufacturing means the cost continues to drop. Similarly, the cost of generating electricity from wind turbines is now comparable with coal and even gas.

    The construction sector uses a tenth of the nation’s energy

    Pat comments that one reason the UK has such a big DIY market is because our houses are so badly designed and built that we have to do something about it. Unfortunately, by the time a typical development house is occupied it is difficult to rectify the corners that have been cut such as insufficient insulation.

    CAT advocates green building, covering many areas relevant to self-builders:

    • Energy
    • Architecture
    • Light
    • Air quality
    • Materials
    • Building waste

    The philosophy behind all CAT buildings is low energy, including low embodied energy and materials. Visitors can sense the difference in these buildings because of the use of traditional materials such as wood, earth and lime. They say it smells and feels different, which feels good.

    Rammed earth theatre

    The technology works; what needs to change is attitudes

    CAT is known for its research and most recently their Zero Carbon Britain report prompted questions in parliament. Pat explains that to get to a zero-carbon state, we’ve got to make some serious changes like reducing flying and meat consumption.

    CAT also plays a key educational role, offering:

    The five-day self-build course runs twice a year for groups of around 16 people, and covers a mixture of theory and practice. It includes talks on energy, materials, services, organising the site, planning and building regulations. The course encourages people to think beyond their intuitive design ideas and ask themselves what is sustainable.

    Timber frame is the most applicable method for self-build projects

    CAT only teaches timber frame construction to self-builders. There are various advantages: the techniques are relatively easy and timber is plentiful, durable, strong and easy to cut. Local timber has very low embodied energy and provides work for people in the countryside as well as good habitats for wildlife.

    Timber frame construction helps self-builders gain confidence and Pat has seen many go on to tackle plastering and some plumbing and electrics.

    However, his tip for a successful project is to choose the technologies that suit you. If you’re good at brickwork then it’s okay to choose that; it’s a cheap way to build and can be suitable for low energy houses.

    Choose your insulation wisely: condensation can rot a timber frame

    The evidence for using breathable construction is very strong although it’s still not universally adopted, despite the well-known risk of condensation. CAT promotes the use of insulations made from recycled newsprint, cellulose, sheep’s wool, flax, hemp, and cork – rather than plastic foams. Sheep’s wool, for example, smells great, doesn’t itch and is easy to fit.

    Is green building always more expensive?

    Pat argues that although many sustainable materials can be more expensive, there are cost-effective options. For example, reusing materials is often cheaper. In other cases, for the same budget one might choose a superior and more environmentally friendly product, e.g. a locally grown hardwood floor rather than a “glued-up” laminate from Germany.

    Saving energy doesn’t have to mean discomfort

    Pat explains that the centre has survived on very little money but it’s never been uncomfortable, as practices such as car and food sharing have made it very cheap to live and work there. CAT tries to show that it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s an attractive way to live.

    “If everybody does a little, we’ll only achieve a little.”

    Regarding climate change, Pat quotes David McKay, explaining we’re past the point where small changes by everyone are enough. We need to do more.

    CAT aims to show visitors that ecology is complex, with every little thing affecting every other thing, challenging them to really change their lifestyle with regard to energy. Beyond changing light bulbs and saving water are more demanding adjustments such as an electric car or sacrificing space or aesthetics for insulation.

    The best solutions are not technological nor lifestyle

    Pat says in the future the Industrial Revolution and its enormous fossil fuel use will be seen as a wrong turning. So we need to start correcting our course now, but building on what we’ve done.

    We are often reminded that if most of the fossil fuels aren’t left in the ground, life will become untenable for most of the world. Remembering this while planning a self-build will yield a better result at the end, as Pat says: “As well as saving the planet, you’ve kind of saved yourself a bit.”

    Find out more

    Visit the website of Pat Borer

    Visit the website of the Centre for Alternative Technology

    Transcript

    Download a transcript of the interview with Pat Borer

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