Categorie: embodied energy
What is better , a friend active in the beverage world asked, recycling aluminium cans or recycling glass bottles? Neither, I immediately replied: always reuse, and never use aluminum. As the Dutch national environmental center reports: a deposit beer bottle is 8 x as environmentally friendly as a disposable bottle….
Why didn’t we realize this before… Since a year or two there has been a working group of a number of collaborating researchers in Europe, under the wings of an international NGO (iiSBE) who are investigating what the ‘carbon budget’ implies for the construction sector or the built environment. The…
Some time ago , I was in a meeting for writing a biobased building manifest. Very interesting discussions, which were hardly ever held at the policy level. Although I get signals that the discussion about the impact of materials, as a rebound effect of all energy measures, does penetrate mainstream…
This is an extended version of a previous post on linked in, which had a lot of reactions.. {april 2019} When it comes to Embodied Energy, we are used to normalize this over the lifespan of a building ( or a product) , and in that case it does…
Last month I finally visited the ‘2226’ office in Austria near Bregenz. The building, realized about 4 years ago, already won many prizes. What is special about this building: it has no heating system, and in fact no ventilation system, except windows that can be opened. When I first heard…
Architects love to be able to design and build an iconic tower. And a city counselor can leave his signature with it. Well, it happens that the world is urbanizing, and that we see a lot of high-rises in planning, framed as ’there is no other way’: we have to…
Many colleagues in the field feel frustrated when trying to improve the materials performance of buildings: the lobbying and framing of materials is huge, blurring a real discussion on what materials with best performance and lowest impact should be applied. I have come across these discussions myself many times as…
(letter send to party leaders in parliament) 1 The annual increased installation of solar panels makes CO2 emissions rise. This is because solar panels need about 3 years to compensate for their CO2 during production. So if more solar panels are installed every year than in the previous year, that…
Big headlines in Nature last week: [1]” Emissions are still rising: disaster up the cuts “And” Leaders at climate summit get bad news: CO2 emissions are rising again “. Astonishing that may not be, however: if the economy continues to grow, and therefore consumption, energy and material use will increase,…
The Trias Energetica is one of the generic guidelines that has a wide adoption in the Netherlands since the nineties: it states that, in order of importance: 1 reduce energy demand, 2 use renewable energy 3 use fossil fuels as effective as possible. But is this still valid? First some…