Fri 22 Aug 2008
You haven’t got mail
When I first started this online column dedicated to all things eco and green I could not move for low energy emails - providing you don’t print them out. Sustainable this; carbon neutral that, I was wrapped in feelgood geothermals, welcoming industry initiatives and government directives. Perhaps your superhero was not going to be flying solo, or solar, in saving the planet after all.Now nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zero. It is hardly surprising. The bottom – and we are talking an industrial vat of All Bran – has fallen with unbelievable speed out of the market, sending housebuilders in a flat spin and HR departments hastily swotting up on employment law as thousands of industry professionals were made redundant. Nothing has been built be it green, brown or deep purple as the blackest of clouds descends on housebuilding. If I had walked – I can’t fly again until I lose a bit of weight – swishing my green cape into the boardroom of a Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey or Barratt, saying: “hi lads, I’m Zero Carbon. Still on course for 2015?” your eco-warrior would have had all colours of the rainbow kicked out of him.
It would take a brave PR today to offer housebuilders tree-hugging love about how their clients can help them cut emissions and take the industry to Code Level 6 sustainable heaven. It may help sell houses tomorrow as the next generation demand a green conscience from manufacturers in all sectors, but unless you can help sell a new home today, or preferably yesterday, the door on new initiatives and meeting and exceeding eco-standards remains firmly closed. Short-sighted maybe, but entirely understandable in the current market. This is why the Government, and indeed anyone with half a care for the future of our environment, should find ways to help housebuilding and fast, otherwise tomorrow will never come.
Don’t expect me to weep hot tears for housebuilders, but my heart bleeds for the planet. Developers were quite happy to reap the harvest in the good years without putting anything in the grain store for a rainy day, but even Noah would not have been prepared for this biblical flood.
A lot of good men and women are out of jobs because of the severity of the housing crisis. How many of them you wonder are sustainability managers or the equivalent? how many energy consultants have had contracts cut short? The only consolation for Mother Earth is that construction in the UK is the highest producer of waste. Not when we are not constructing anything it isn’t.
The industry will get back on its feet; it has to for the sake of the economy, as well as communities. But just when many developers were waking up to their green responsibilities and at least having a go at cracking the sustainable codes, they are hit by a housing crisis travelling slightly quicker than Jamaica’s Olympic sprint king Usain Bolt. How far will it set back housing’s environmental agenda, yet alone the now laughable Government target of three million new homes by 2020?
So the only thing to do as the wet UK weather matched the mood was head for the sun and a couple of days in Portugal on the Western Algarve. To Alma Verde to be precise, which means Green Soul. Meet Englishman Jes Mainwaring, project architect at this delightful Portuguese village development and an environmental innovator of huge talent and, dare I say it, energy.
When it comes to low energy and sustainability we can learn an awful lot from Mainwaring, although he is the first to admit that Portugal has a big advantage over the UK in that the sun allows his Coolhouse system to work efficiently.
Forget the awful whirr and belch of air-conditioning. Coolhouse passes fresh external air through ground tubes and into the homes, using the constant underground temperature which is around the annual average air temperature – 14 degrees in southern Portugal – to moderate the air temperature by cooling in summer and warming in winter. So the UK is on the back foot already. However Mainwaring 12 years ago won the Green Building of the Year award for the new halls of residence at Linacre College, Oxford, some way from Lagos in the Algarve sunbelt.
Energy consumption is not all about gas and electricity, but what it takes to manufacture component parts of a building and transport them to site – the embodied energy.
“By the time they are built many buildings have already cost in embodied energy 10-15 percent of the energy they will use during their entire lifetime of use and occupation,” says Mainwaring. Hence his choice of natural, local materials, including adobe sun-baked clay bricks. Alma Verde is no yoghurt making, tantric yoga hippy retreat, but a breath of fresh air, with the internal layouts, roof lines and landscaping all playing their green part.
The development is aesthetically pleasing too, for Mainwaring likes to have a bit of fun with his designs, while remaining passionately committed to sustainable construction.
Not all his ideas can be transported to the UK, unless he can get the sun through customs at Faro Airport. But not only is his green architectural creed fascinating, I understood it all. The best ideas are invariably the simplest. Pay Jes a visit and share a vinho verde in Alma Verde (www.almaverde.com). Say Zero Carbon sent you.
Posted by Show House
in Barratt Development, Jes Mainwaring, Persimmon Homes, Taylor Wimpey, The Zero Carbon Column on Fri 22 Aug 2008
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