• Home
  • Services
    • Net Zero Accelerator
    • Sustainability/Net Zero Strategy
    • Employee Engagement for Sustainability
    • Professional Development for Sustainability (CPD)
  • Net Zero Business Academy
  • Our Clients
  • About Us
  • Gareth’s Blog
  • Sustainability Resources
  • Contact Us

Call us on 0191 265 7899

info@terrainfirma.co.uk
Terra Infirma Terra Infirma Terra Infirma Terra Infirma
Bringing Sustainability
to Life
  • Home
  • Services
    • Net Zero Accelerator
    • Sustainability/Net Zero Strategy
    • Employee Engagement for Sustainability
    • Professional Development for Sustainability (CPD)
  • Net Zero Business Academy
  • Our Clients
  • About Us
  • Gareth’s Blog
  • Sustainability Resources
  • Contact Us

Built it, and the carbon will come

Built it, and the carbon will come

30th June 2020 Uncategorised No Comments

I’m writing this in the modern extension of a house which is 125 years old today, more or less (the pic shows the extension going up). I read somewhere that the vast Victorian suburbs like the one I live in were designed for 25 years’ lifespan. Certainly the build quality of our old house is pretty poor – we’ve had to fix several mistakes made by the original builders and when we recently stripped our basement walls, they had clearly been built out of whatever old crap was lying around at the time. We’ve done a lot to improve its energy efficiency – doubling the loft insulation and adding insulation to offshoots which had never been insulated, putting in triple glazing and insulating the some external solid walls. But, we have to face it, this will never be a low carbon house because of the way it was built in the first place.

It has been estimated that the vast majority of buildings in 2050 already exist today so we are stuck with what we have now. Every time we build an out of town shopping centre/business park or major road ‘upgrade’, that is helping to lock us into a particular carbon trajectory for decades to come. And yet more of the same keep coming.

This is why, as a Sustainability professional, you need to be all over any capital project proposal – a new factory or office, a new boiler, a new road layout, a new process line – like a rash. It is *always* cheaper to cut carbon at the concept stage than it is post-commissioning. Using ‘the toddler test’ – asking ‘why?’ until it drives everybody up the wall – is a particularly powerful tool here. People often assume the new ‘X’ will be just like the old ‘X’ but a bit shinier – you need to challenge people why we shouldn’t be looking at options ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ instead. Only then will we lock ourselves into a low carbon trajectory.

Tags: eco-designemployee engagementinvestment
No Comments
0
Share

Leave a Reply

Your email is safe with us.
Cancel Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to The Low Carbon Agenda – your free monthly guide to implementing Sustainability

* indicates required

Contact Information

  • Gareth Kane
  • Terra Infirma Limited
  • 157 Stratford Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE6 5AS
  • 0191 265 7899
  • info@terrainfirma.co.uk
Follow @GarethKane

Twitter Feed

Tweets by GarethKane

Latest Blogs

Should we bin the phrase ‘Net Zero’?

4th December 2023

At the weekend I was listening to a debate on Net Zero on...

Jonathan Oxley of the CBI on on Net Zero, Beyond Petroleum, CBAM, Government Policy and much more

1st December 2023

A fantastic and informative interview with Jonathan Oxley, a...

© Terra Infirma 2018 | All Rights Reserved | Site designed and created by Resilient Business Systems