Building rating systems provide de facto building codes for ‘green’ building. Every other product claims to be ‘greener’ than its competitors, whilst high ‘star’ ratings are not preventing new buildings from consuming more energy per sqm than their cousins from the middle of the last century.
Government has been abandoning its regulatory role, leaving the industry to set its own standards. That dangerous route makes the goal of better environmental building performance a discretionary option, rather than a legal requirement. If the science of climate change is even half right, we need to enforce strong environmental requirements immediately. The concept of choice is a ridiculous luxury.
Government regulation of building performance reduces risk, creates a level playing field for industry and provides enforceable rules everyone can understand, but Australia lags behind most of Europe and the US in this regard.
Before effective codes can be brought in there must be accepted baseline measures of what ‘green’ really means. Life cycle assessments deliver that kind of data. I had not seen significant progress towards that goal until I participated recently in a workshop on environmental weightings. Exciting? Yes! It was one of the most interesting events I have attended in a long time.
Initiated by the AusIndustry Industry Cooperative Innovation Programme, the ‘Buildings & Environment: Full Life Cycle Assessment National Environmental Weightings Workshops’ will create a national database providing comprehen sive information on environmen tal impacts from building and construction materials.
Weightings are crucial. Even if all the scores in a rating system are the same (one point for ticking every box), the application of different weights of importance for each point can change the overall score. Thus, if one product addresses energy saving, water efficiency and habitat loss and a competing product doesn’t address habitat loss and you give low weighting to protecting habitat, the product that does not address the issue can be seen to be very competitive with one that does — and vice versa. It all comes back to values.
Different values change what we do: take a hammer, drive nails into timber to make a house frame and you have a creative technology. Take the same hammer and smash someone’s head in and you have a weapons technology — the tool remains the same, but its application changes radically, solely on the basis of different applications of values.
We filled in ‘weighting sheets’ divided into: global issues; local and site issues; and internal environment. Each was sub- divided to be increasingly specific, eg. global warming (global); habitat loss (local and site); and comfort (internal). We distributed 100 points according to how we saw the relative importance of each issue and were then given the results, which were compared with those from workshops in the UK, US, NZ and around Australia.
Surprisingly, Australian consultants, materials/products producers, investors and activists/lobbyists generated very similar weighting profiles — they agreed with each other in the relative importance of the three main issues and reflected the overall national average. Materials/products respondents showed marginally more concern about global warming than activists/lobbyists!
The Building Products Innovation Council (BPIC) is one of the primary funding bodies for this research and the level and sophistication of concern about environmental issues has developed strongly in this sector. Clearly, being ‘green’ in relation to the built environment raises similar concerns across the built environment spectrum.
If this leads to the successful establishment of baseline references for life cycle analysis (LCA), we will be able to establish consistent, meaningful, comparative measures for environmental impacts, not only for the eco- labelling of building materials, but building rating systems.
Once that happens, a revision of the Building Code of Australia could deliver enforceable, systemic performance requirements and begin transforming our building stock into an ecologically sustainable built environment.
For more information about the workshops, which are still taking place, see: http://www.edgeenvironment.co m.au/index.php?a=weightings
Paul Downton is an architect, urban ecologist and director of Ecopolis Architects. He is the architect of the Christie Walk ecocity development and an editor of the Your Home techni cal manual. Downton is a long time advocate of radical change in the built environment towards the creation of ecological cities.
