Categorie: housing stock
How long do buildings last? There’s little scientifically sound to say on the matter, and there are hardly any studies that have fundamentally examined it. Like the question: when does a building lose its primary function as a dwelling when no maintenance is carried out? In other words, when is…
The year 2100: Finally! It’s the year 2100, and for the first time, CO2 emissions from buildings will start going down. It should have been already zero by 2050, but due to spreading emissions over the lifespan of buildings, it’s only mathematically the case from 2100 onwards. Yearly that will…
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 environment. How much CO2 may be emitted (invested) per new…
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 agree in general with the contents and analyses ( to…
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. (Or the industry has adapted them the way we want…
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…
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, the sea level is rising, the rivers are overflowing, the…
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…
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 response and attitude to some problems with vaccines. There are…
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 below the 1.5 or 2 degree threshold is limited. Science…
