Calculating in CO2 remains a challenge, especially when it comes to the remaining budget. There is in the Netherlands a small action group that is trying to define how we should deal with the remaining CO2 budget for the built… Continue Reading
Last week, two interesting reports were published analysing how regulations can better support ‘sustainable’ material use. Very esteemed colleagues, united in a Dutch ‘Gideons tribe’ to make the buildings sector move faster, have been working on this. [1] I can… Continue Reading
With vegetables, we’ve been doing it for years: most current vegetables never existed, in an autonomous evolutionary process. We as humans have slowly transformed them so that they grow the way we appreciate them, and want them on our plates.… Continue Reading
There are many ways you can start “accounting” for CO2 (as comments on the previous article also showed), but at the end of the day what matters are absolute CO2 emissions, from whatever activity. And cutting down a tree and… Continue Reading
It’s about time to face the hard truth here in the Netherlands: building below sea level isn’t handy, to say the least, to say modestly it’s destroying capital, and to say it hard: it’s endangering people. The soil is sinking,… Continue Reading
Life has an end, but is there also an ‘end of life’, for products and buildings? Which is frequently used in science, like in building evaluations calculating with a maximum life span, but seems weird. It is understandable in trade,… Continue Reading
The Species vs the Individual, in the Built Environment? The Corona lockdown and approach continues to surprise: both in what the government does and how people deal with it. What is particularly striking in this phase of Corona is the… Continue Reading
A few years ago, together with colleagues Guillaume Habert from Switzerland and Thomas Lützkendorf from Germany, I started exploring the CO2 budget that was still available, and the consequences for construction. This budget of maximum remaining CO2 emissions to stay… Continue Reading
(this text was send as an open letter to the installations industry , media and policymakers, on 26 March 2020) What is happening around the corona virus today, is understandable and needed, health is paramount. Let that be clear. But… Continue Reading
In the Netherlands most houses are heated by natural gas, but now we want to phase out that gas heating. Which of course is in principle easy: just close the tap, which is in the gas-fields in the North of… Continue Reading