By Jeff, Dan, and Alex
5
22 ratings
The podcast currently has 168 episodes available.
Our guest, Liz Male has been on our radar for a while. She is a figure who has been working in the construction sector since the 1990s, an ally to the sustainability sector, a great communicator, and an experienced thinker.
When we met earlier in the year we talked about a lot of things, but the consistent theme of our conversation was 'why we need to tell better stories about the built environment'. That said, we kept our powder as dry as we could and moved on to discuss when we might be able to get her onto the podcast to talk about it from the ZAP platform.
We get a lot into the chat. Of particular interest is the historical perspective that Liz can offer. A lot has changed since Koyoto
Hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
Apologies for the delay, the lost podcast has been returned and is ready for release.
'Don't Waste Buildings' should be a straightforward proposition. It seems obvious. Especially so in the face of the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the business of the built environment is not yet on board completely.
Our guests for this episode are the founders of UK-based campaign group Don't Waste Buildings, Will Hurst (Architects Journal) Leanne Tritton (Ing Media), and Richard Nelson (Abyss Global).
They're a group who are seeking to remedy this challenge by pressuring government and persuading business to both do better. They're doing some really interesting work and they're new, so they need support.
Please note: the graphic we refer can be found here (about 15 minutes in). I'll update this reference with a link to the Passive House Plus article once it's published.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
This week we're speaking with Steven Heath, technical director at Knauf Insulation (UK and Ireland) and a really interesting and experienced person in the sector.
So while we had him, we ran through a bunch of our favourite hoary subjects: measuring performance, performance guarantees, and what we think about EPCs.
Knauf is a firm that's done some really interesting work in all of these areas and has even managed to make headway with the UK state in getting them to think about the value of testing performance, with EPCs and whatever SHDF is called now (the state-driven money tap for decarbonising social housing).
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
A long-overdue episode with friend of the show, Lloyd Alter, about a blog he wrote and his book "The Story of Upfront Carbon".
We get into the language of sustainability, carbon, and lots of the words that are ubiquitous in this space (sustainability and the built environment, obviously).
We get into the sustainability of travel, to some extent too,
Lloyd's book: The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a Life of Just Enough Offers a Way Out of the Climate Crisis
InnovateUK – Net Zero Heat Open Day
A showcase of IUK innovation lab projects including Transform-ER
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
A wise woman once said: "sustainability is the doing, ESG is the talking about it".
Today an Irish house-building giant has made a major move on Passive House — publishing a positioning paper and announcing the ongoing construction of over 1,700 homes to the standard.
Joining us to talk about this are Nicola Cronin (Senior Sustainability Analyst) and Stephen O'Shea (Head of Sustainable Construction and ESG Reporting).
Rather than this being another episode about Passive House we're more concerned with why a massive housebuilder has chosen to build to the standard. In this case, the answer highlights the positive impact that corporate reporting – in this case ESG – can have on the practice of construction.
Where we've often derided ESG factors as a corporate fig leaf, in this instance ESG factors have driven institutional change. Most importantly, the scale of this change clearly illustrates the massive impact that big developers can have. If they choose to try.
In short, we're talking about how change is made and why change is made.
Links are below.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
Jeff invited Mhairi Grant, co founder of award-winning architectural practice Paper Igloo, to join us to talk about the challenges of ensuring that one's ideas for sustainable design actually make their way through to the construction phase.
The subject was sparked by a conversation she and Jeff had about lessons learned from a flawed project (that we discuss) and what it takes to ensure that our best, or even just easiest ideas are delivered upon in the build phase.
Usually, we'd think about specifying a project in a way that can resist value engineering, but sometimes the project can be scuppered by something as simple as an easily avoidable comprehension issue.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
Why is making UK homes more efficient so difficult? So asked journalist Leyla Boulton earlier this year in the pages of the Financial Times.
Seeing a retrofit article in the FT piqued our interest, even more so once we realised Leyla is a senior editor with an esteemed background in political and environmental reporting. She was reporting on Kyoto where no one cared.
Since beginning her retrofit journey Leyla has become a campaigner and it's this that you'll hear as we discuss the mainstreaming retrofit for the able-to-pay market, an endeavour borne of her experiences delving into the retrofit sector motivated by efforts to make her own home more energy efficient.
Typically we talk about the barriers to take up, a desperately unhelpful planning bureaucracy, poorly designed institutional support, hamstrung local authorities and councils, and the need to do better in designing a system that works.
Do check Leyla's article if you can. In spite of the broad air of dismay at how difficult things are, she describes meeting lots of helpful and enthusiastic people who were hamstrung in their efforts.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
In the UK every day the construction industry produces enough waste to fill a football stadium.
Rightly, former guest, Chris Clarke (SCAPE) has got a bee in his bonnet about construction waste and is making efforts to draw attention to the issue. He's not just concerned with the profligate use of resources and the impact on carbon emissions, it's the lackadaisical nature of the waste itself.
Waste management accounts for £1.5BN of construction spending every year. In an industry that's operating on margins so tight that any kind of change can be seen to be prohibitively risky, it seems absurd that such a significant amount of waste is priced into every single large-scale project.
But, while waste, accounting, reuse, circularity, and MMC are all concepts that have an important part to play, but most important is the front-end work that can be done to reduce waste at the point of design.
Whichever way we look at it, when we're asked where we might find the money to drive the circular economy or reduce emissions, it would seem that there might be a simple answer. Even if the solution itself isn't so simple.
If we're hoping for infrastructure changes that will make a significant contribution to net-zero efforts and generate revenue, it looks like we might have an easy-ish mark.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
Something-like twelve months on from inception we thought we'd catch up with what's happening at Living Places, the multi-disciplinary, impact-focused consultancy co-founded by this week's guest Cat Magill.
Where last year Rufus Grantham came on the podcast to tell us all about the organisation he was in the midst of founding, this year Cat joined us to tell us about what they've been up to.
There was plenty to talk about, but in short, the finance part isn’t that easy. However, they're making progress and figuring out how to make it happen, and Cat tells us all about it.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
This week's guest is Caroline Ashe Brady of KORE Retrofit in Ireland, one of the objectively successful one-stop-shop retrofit providers to have emerged over the past few years.
Caroline is a business leader who we’re a proper fan of, so apologies in advance for our ‘so Caroline please tell us, why are you so great’ style questioning. That said, you can trust us in this opinion, we’ve done the work with these guys.
Caroline was happy to talk about their method, process, challenges and offer up some top tips for how to make it work in the sector, which should be valuable to anyone involved wherever they're based.
KORE Retrofit is a business that is ambitious about doing better and has demonstrated that retrofit can be a commercial success. It's not easy, and no-one is perfect, but KORE is operating with a practical plan about how they’re going to do better, not just offering up words.
Notes from the show
**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.
**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
The podcast currently has 168 episodes available.
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