Resource flow – surely energy is the only indicator?

We hear everyday about global warming and how our energy consumption is responsible for climate change. In response to this problem there appears to be an armoury of legislation and media attention requiring us all to reduce our energy demand. I agree that the low carbon economy is the way forward; however I must admit that I also get extremely frustrated by the single minded concentration on carbon. What ever happened to the Sustainable Development agenda?

I am often asked to attend sustainability meetings relating to the design and construction of buildings and the first thing that people ask will tend to relate to energy efficiency and ‘what renewables should we have on this scheme?’ While the concept of zero carbon buildings is an important step forward in the reduction of atmospheric CO2, questions need to be asked as to whether CO2 production should be the only environmental measure. Currently we can legally build unsustainable buildings which might be energy efficient, but will still have a significant impact on the environment in construction and operation.

We now have mandatory targets for carbon consumption tightened in 2006 through Part L of the Building Regulations, of which everyone is aware, this is supported by the energy labelling for buildings and the likely carbon taxes. However, step beyond the boundaries of carbon emissions of a building in operation and the picture is very different. It should be actively recognised that the final product might be efficient, but what about the environmental and sustainability costs involved in its production? Shouldn’t the starting point be detailed resource footprinting, complemented by environmental life cycle assessments to evaluate the cradle to cradle impact of production and operation? The argument here, in connection with the question of environmental controls, is that recognisable standards should be reached in terms of a range of environmental and social indicators, to include function, performance and whole life costs.

Based on research undertaken by White Young Green, which looked at the environmental life cycle performance (including CO2 and equivalents) we found that some construction materials might perform well from a carbon perspective, but if you consider other environmental indicators e.g. depletion of natural resources and pollution, the benefit of such materials is questionable. In one project of which I was involved the client selected a building component based on its low carbon footprint, rather than its overall environmental performance, which was low, as this was perceived to be the most environmentally beneficial.

While environmental factors might be addressed in the UK through environmental legislation, are resources imported from other parts of the world subject to the same environmental controls? It should be remembered that, in addition to energy and carbon production affecting the climate, sustainability of the planet’s other resources must also be seen as a global issue. Or maybe everything is OK so long as we don’t use the UK’s own resources?

A further consideration concerns avoidable waste generation and of course unnecessary resource consumption. While stringent efforts continue to discourage carbon production, I still see wholesale wastage of materials on building sites: packaging, insulation, timber, plasterboard, pallets etc, all of which seems to go largely unnoticed. Similarly I have visited manufacturing businesses where the cost of energy is nearly 100 times higher than the waste bill. Although it is perhaps understandable that energy costs are higher, the large scale difference perhaps reveals that the environmental costs of waste are not reflected in taxation and disposal costs.

Last year, the Government introduced Site Waste Management Plans in an effort to counter the above phenomenon on construction sites. However, it remains to be seen how effective such plans will be, since the materials concerned are extremely diverse in their nature and the true cost of waste from cradle to grave, unlike energy, is unclear.

The Government has already introduced a “Code for Sustainable Homes”. This is compulsory for affordable housing and a voluntary standard for private housing. The Code concentrates primarily on carbon and water consumption. While laudable in itself, I would suggest that many other environmental and sustainability issues have not been fully acknowledged by the Code with no specific mandatory targets having been set to include other vitally important environmental indicators relating to the consumption of resources.

The world’s life support systems are complex and the issue of energy and resource consumption is inextricably linked. For example, the consumption of resources, even where this does not directly produce CO2, may still indirectly contribute to climate change (e.g. deforestation, waste production.) I believe that the construction of buildings which are carbon efficient is extremely important; however there is a serious risk that this matter will come to be viewed as the sole environmental indicator. It is important in the global ecosystem that the place of processes such as natural resource depletion and waste production, as well as energy use is fully quantified and recognised and that their respective synergies can be taken into account and, where necessary, legislated for.

We are consuming resources beyond our means. The construction industry alone consumes 450m tonnes of resources per annum and on an individual scale in the UK it has been estimated that each individual consumes 250 tonnes of resources per annum (Biffaward, Counting the Cost of Consumption). A large proportion of the resources we consume are then discarded as waste. Currently I do not believe that the full impact of resource consumption is understood or has been adequately acknowledged.

Energy is in our sights at the moment, but what happens when other natural resources that we take for granted are no longer abundantly available. The problem is that few natural resources are properly recognised by our global trading systems. Consequently the market continues to ignore many of the externalised costs associated with their use.

To enable us to tackle the issue we need to fully understand the full environmental impacts and externalised costs associated with global resource consumption. The issue of resource consumption is complicated and will require a global policy which is coherent and is able to tackle the many wide ranging and cross cutting issues. In the face of a rising global population (estimated 10bn by 2050) with only one planet and a range of increasingly scare natural resources, can we really afford to put all our efforts just into carbon reduction?

Clare Shuttleworth
Associate Director – Sustainability
Tel: 0113 278 7111
Email:clare.shuttleworth@wyg.com
www.wyg.com