BioRegional returned to Ecobuild a couple of weeks ago, the world’s biggest event for sustainable design, construction, and the built environment, with a daily programme of workshops and events. We held well-attended interactive workshops on:
- What does one planet living look like and how can you embed it into your organisation’s operations?
- Designing for behaviour change: how to encourage green lifestyles in homes and communities
- What does one planet living look like and how can you embed it into your retrofit projects?
- What does one planet living look like and how can you embed it into your new build project?
- The basics of biomass for architects and developers
- Greenovation – how green construction brings opportunities for entrepreneurs and small-scale builders
A creative session on behaviour change raised ideas of watching Saturday night TV in the pub to reduce our individual carbon emissions from individually heating and lighting our own homes, and raising awareness of water usage amongst school children as a way of influencing their parent’s behaviour.
Another session took lessons from BioRegional’s experience of working on retrofit projects and applied them to two theoretical case studies – one retrofitting an area of a local authority, and another retrofitting a social housing block.
BioRegional’s co-founder Pooran Desai reflected “it is brilliant that green has become mainstream – it was the first time I really thought that green was seen as THE thing to aspire to in the construction and development industries; and to some extent green is seen as a potential growth industry in an otherwise very difficult economy going forward”. This was certainly the case for photovoltaics, with a huge increase in the number of panel manufacturers showing at the exhibition.
With Ecobuild this year moving to the Excel Centre, having out-grown Earls Court, its size has become slightly overwhelming. This is clearly encouraging if an indication of the growth of the sector, but did leave us wondering if exhibitors go through any vetting process to assess if they are green in any meaningful way – some of it seemed to be just ‘Build’ rather than ‘Ecobuild’. We would advocate a sustainability assessment questionnaire similar to the One Planet Products suppliers assessment as a good starting point. Furthermore, the scale of this event with elaborate exhibition stands constructed for just 3 days raises the usual question over the environmental impacts of the event, and whether more could be done to make it truly sustainable.
