Get Sust! Issue 35

Sustainable construction
by Sandy Halliday

The increasing understanding of appropriate development and design quality as fundamental aspects of social justice is heartening, says Sandy Halliday, principle of Gaia Research, on the first page of her new book, but “the widening gap between rhetoric and action takes the edge off any urgency for celebration”.

In ‘Sustainable Construction’ she sets out to cut through the rhetoric and make taking action much easier.

The book began life as notes and supporting materials for a training course sponsored by the DTi and the Ecology Building Society. This is a great advantage, because it means the chapters are short and snappy, and very well illustrated. On top of that, each chapter has an excellent list of additional resources.

Acknowledging that there’s already a great deal of material out there on the topic, Sandy instead picks out the highlights, using copious case studies from the UK and further afield to illustrate her points.

There’s something for every student of sustainability here, with whole chapters devoted to the ‘history’ of sustainable development, and to the introduction and further development of sustainability-related policies and legislation. The latter isn’t bang up-to-date (granted, it’s hard for a book to keep up with the machinations of UK legislation) but it would have been helpful to know how far back some of the text dates. For example, information on the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive comments “at the time of going to press the government had not announced how it would put in place UK requirements”.

But really, that’s a minor niggle. There are plenty of gems: a great debate between an architect and a joiner in Leeds in 2003 over whether to repair old timber frame windows or rip out the lot and stick in quick-fix uPVC units; the chapter on appraisal tools and techniques sheds light on several tools not encountered in most ‘standard’ texts; and the chapter on materials selection adds a fourth and fifth dimension to the waste hierarchy, namely ‘refuse’ and ‘repair’ over and above the usual ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’.

Of particular note is a great chapter on electrical installations. This makes the point that, despite considerable focus on lighting design (which gets a chapter all to itself), there is still insufficient attention paid to the use of electricity in buildings – an issue that’s only going to grow in importance as fuel prices soar (not to mention, of course, the environmental impact). This chapter not only reviews the main power generation techniques, it also assesses the hidden impacts of the IT sector – in terms of the rapid obsolescence of systems that then contribute to pollution both during the manufacture of new equipment, and disposal of the old kit.

At just under £30, this is an excellent primer for anyone starting out on the road to sustainable construction.

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Sustainable construction, by Sandy Halliday, is published by Butterworth-Heinemann, ISBN: 978-0-7506-6394-6. Order from www.elsevierdirect.com/.