Articles on some of the different facets of making a sustainable building
Life Cycle Assessment, Part 3: Relative proportion of embodied and operational carbon
This post is a somewhat belated follow up to the last three posts, which looked at embodied carbon of building materials, introduced whole-building life cycle assessment (LCA), and finally explained LCA further with a worked example. A key point from those blogs was that it was essential to look at the emissions and energy use of a building over it’s entire life span
What does 'sustainable' mean? Sustainable building materials, Part 2
In the last blog I talked about the term ‘natural’ in relation to buildings and sustainability, concluding that it was unhelpful at best, as it doesn’t really tell us anything about a product’s provenance, sustainability, or even level of processing (e.g. wood-fibre board and strawbale and are both described as ‘natural materials’ but neither would exist in their useful form without mechanised human intervention).