Categorie: resources
Last time I wrote about about project development, and how everything was optimized within project borders, but the effects outside the project boundaries were neglected. But between architect and client, it’s just the same, and even worse, as became evident once again when I attended a presentation about a new…
I was forwarded an interesting column, written by a researcher from Ourworldindata, with a comparison in quantity between fossil fuels, and materials extraction. And then the thesis is more or less that the extraction of raw materials to build a renewable energy supply costs many times less raw materials as…
Graphs are powerful images, and unlike written assertions (“opinions”), there is often little discussion about graphs. But they also claim things, and, I notice it myself, I am more inclined to accept something from graphs than from words. Probably because it is easier to recognize your own opinion in them;…
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 using it as a column (or a table, or a…
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, for product developers, that want things to be replaced at…
We can develop beautiful so-called scientific methods to calculate all the effects of our impact, but in the end only two data are relevant: energy and material use, and the rest is derived from that: all emissions, to air or water, pollution, disappearance of forests, , and climate warming and…
At the end of the summer season, some thoughts that came up while practicing ‘doing nothing’ on camping. And I had to think of an always nice comparison with cars: the weight of the car versus the weight of the person to be transported. In other words, how many kg…
In recent years I was a Fellow of the Technical University of Eindhoven, more precisely working with the Building Physics department, in particular with Prof. Wim Zeiler, Installation Technology. And we had interesting discussions, because we strive for the same thing, while we come from different backgrounds. Those discussions can…
I am often amazed at the amount of lights in the built environment, which only seems to be growing. Everyone thinks they have to illuminate everything. Driveways, stairs, gardens, anything you can think of has a light on it. That started yeas ago with the introduction of energy saving light…
Last week I published a letter in the Netherlands, in which I indicated that about 800,000 hectares of land would be needed for the construction of new homes. That’s how it works in a transition: We have to significantly reduce the impact of building. And it is becoming increasingly clear…