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… Continue Reading
Urban heating, or at least the increase thereof, has been in the spotlight for some time. And the basic effects were known to me. But after hearing a lecture by Math Santamouris during a recent Conference, a whole new world… Continue Reading
Why didn’t we realize this before… Since a year or two there has been a working group of a number of collaborating scientists in Europe, under the wings of an international NGO (iiSBE) who are investigating what the ‘carbon budget’… Continue Reading
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… Continue Reading
Amsterdam needs around 50,000 charging points for electric cars. 50,000? Really? Have we gone completely nuts or what? Doesn’t alarm bells start ringing: “What the hell are we doing?” Where do all these raw materials come from, and the energy… Continue Reading
Rifkin some time ago wrote about the 0-marginal cost society. The book had a lot of attention. But cost is a complete different measuring unit as energy or greenhouse gasses. A 0-marginal cost society is not the same as a… Continue Reading
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,… Continue Reading
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.… Continue Reading
Last month the OECD published its report with the latest figures on material consumption worldwide. [1] Currently that is 79 GigaTon of materials per year, and we are going to 167 Gt (!) in 2060. Every year. This includes a… Continue Reading
Since it looks as if we are going to introduce the climate measures for buildings mainly via municipalities or cities, I have recovered some of my older research material about urban sustainability, developed when I worked at Wageningen University. The… Continue Reading