New position at HTA

HTA offer a comprehensive sustainability consultancy service to our clients across the UK. Due to continued growth we require a Sustainability Job Runner to become a key member of the sustainability team providing services for our clients. These include developers, registered social landlords, contractors and manufacturers.
The services offered will include sustainability consultancy for all stages, from planning, technical information, to construction. The role is likely to also involve supervision and co-ordination of more junior staff.
Ideally the role would suit an Architect, or Engineer, or someone working as a Sustainability Consultant.

You will need to show
- that you can work independently with minimal supervision,
- that you are a good communicator, as the role will involve liaising with clients, consultants and local planning authorities.
- good knowledge of planning and construction, along with good written skills, including experience of preparing sustainability reports for planning applications.
- A track record in the residential construction industry

Ideally you will hold relevant qualifications with a Masters Degree in a suitable discipline, in the field of Architecture, Urban Design, and Sustainability.
You will also be a licensed assessor for some or all of the following, in order of preference. Additional training will be
provided where required;
• Code for Sustainable Homes assessor
• NHER – SAP Assessor
• BREEAM Multi – Residential
• EcoHomes Assessor
• BRE – SBEM Assessor
• Other BREEAM Assessor

Experience of working with TAS, NHER Plan Assessor and PHPP is desirable.

Salary neg

To apply send a CV and samples of relevant work to recruit@hta.co.uk

Smart Meters

See my article on smart meters here. Are they good for us, or good for the energy companies? Are we happy to allow utility companies to switch our main appliances on and off at their behest? Are their downsides to this?

Also see this article on the subject, be warned though, its a long one….

Green Building council calls for action

Today the UK GBC called on the UK govt to step up its efforts on developing a sustinable construction industry. As members of the GBC we fully support this call. There has been a lot of talk over the last decade about changes but the pace of implementing those changes has been slow.

Dance City

I will be giving a presentation on our project at Hanham Hall at Dance City in Newcastle on Thursday at 6 pm. This is an event organised by Newcastle City Council as part of their contribution to the Concerto project.

Sustainability Position

I am currently looking for a new team member at HTA. See the main HTA website here for the details.

The lead up to Copenhagen

There is a lot of political activity in Europe on the subject of climate change and carbon dioxide emissions in the run-up to Copenhagen. This is all good news. There is a good roundup of moves to encourage electric cars here
The 10:10 challenge was launched in the UK to encourage a widespread inititive to save 10% of energy in 2010, and France moves to impose a universal carbon tax. This is something that many other countries have examined and found to be too expensive to implement. Not the French! They love bureaucracy!

Ecological Intelligence

The book Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Coleman sets out to characterise and identify the attitude of the title. He describes ecological intelligence as a purchasing attitude that will inform us all about the benefits and problems associated with the products and services that we buy. This change in the purchasing behaviour will come about as we get a better understanding of these benefits and in some cases dangers. He focusses on food and beauty products as two area where consumer behaviour is already changing. He cites the organic movement and websites such as Goodguide as evidence of this. Examples that he doesn’t cite but are more relevant to an European audience are

• the BRE Green Guide , a rating system for the construction industry
• the ethical superstore, a store whose aim is to supply products which are already highly rated for being environmentally friendly, fairtrade, and/or organic,
• topten , a site that combines information from many european countries on the highest performing products from an energy saving perspective in a number of popular categories.

It can be seen from this short list that there is already a substantial amount of effort underway to provide the information Coleman wishes to see ‘out there’ but it is less clear how this information is affecting consumer behaviour, particularly in an economic downturn. I recommed the book, it is written simply and clearly, and his tone is that of a participant rather than an observer which makes it easier to engage with.

Article on Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate

See here for my article on the Building4Change website.

Tramore Tesco

Whilst on holiday here, I took the opportunity to visit the new Tramore Tesco, billed as the most environmentally superstore in Ireland. It is a flagship store for Tesco and sets out how their new stores in Ireland will be built from now on. See the press release here. The store is frankly nothing to get excited about and if this is the best Tesco can come up with then they aren’t trying very hard. The environmental credentials can be summed up in two lines, wood materials in the construction and solar panels on the roof. The wood I can confirm is real, as for the solar panels, they are either not there or they are not linked to the realtime display which is supposed to tell us how much carbon dioxide it is saving, as the display is blank.
More importantly than any of this is the fact that the store is sited on the outskirts of town,beside an equally dismal new Lidl, floating in a sea of carparking and competing with a perfectly good supermarket which was already built nearer to the town centre with good connections to buses and walking routes. Why these stores got planning I do not know, clearly the lessons of how to develop town centres in a sustainable way has not reached Waterford planning Dept.
P.S. (Two days later I visited the store again and the display is now working, showing a saving per day of about 3.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per day.)

The Carbon Quilt

This site the Carbon Quilt sets out to help us to visualise the amount of CO2 produced by various activities and countries. One of the biggest problems facing anyone who has to convince another person of the importance of dealing with Carbon emissions is the fact that the stuff is invisible. If we could come up with a way of persuading a colourful atom to bond with carbon dioxide so everyone could see it, we would be a lot further along in persuading the majority of the population that there is an important issue to be dealt with. I like the Carbon Quilt because it attempts to dal with this problem by giving CO2 cover a thickness and then showing how much of the Earth a particular activity is responsible for covering with this ‘quilt’. I enjoyed comparing one countries output to anothers and comparing one city with anothers. The fact that it is enjoyable is a good thing and can be used to clarify to anyone the extent of the problem. My son told me today that an amount of coal is dug up every day sufficient to build a hill the height of the Eiffel tower, and somehow that tells me a lot about that amount of coal without my having to learn a lot of figures. We need similar ways of understanding the impact of an invisible and odourless gas and the Carbon Quilt looks like a step in the right direction.