Sustainability: are you a box ticker or a free thinker?

What defines a sustainable building? A sedum roof? Check. Cedar cladding? Check. Token photovoltaic panels? Check.

Builders, developers, architects and their clients are playing the system: getting the brownie points for using ‘sustainable’ materials or elements when in reality they’re just building what they’ve always been building.

It’s convenient to reduce the sustainability debate to a simple matter of ticking boxes on a checklist, but this is a short-sighted approach to a complex area.

Others are going beyond the current maze of rules and ratings to create their own definition of sustainability, but the truth is that there are no simple answers. CM went in search of some grown-up answers to the question of what sustainable specification might mean.

The first hurdle is the client. ‘The problem we come up against when bidding for work is that clients see issues of sustainability as a badge of the building. They say “How much sustainability can we get for £100,000?”,’ says Peter Williams, director and sustainability adviser at architect RMJM.

Getting the fundamentals right, such as energy use, how people use the building and the building’s orientation, is much more important than including obvious ‘sustainable’ elements, says Williams. This is sometimes difficult for clients to understand as there is often a temptation to go after ‘easy points’ when you’re after a BREEAM rating (see right), such as adding soft landscaping or encouraging biodiversity. ‘Up against it on costs, you are going to target easy points,’ admits Williams.

In fact, a ‘sustainable’ building will probably look much like any other. Architect Rab Bennetts, who designed LandSecs’ New Street Square, cites flexibility as one of the most important elements of an economically sustainable building. This particular development allows for tenants to install air conditioning – or not – as they require. ‘To design a sustainable building, architects have to surpress their egos to some extent and do something which is simple and practical,’ says Bennetts in LandSecs’ 2006 Corporate Social Responsibility report.

Tom Bloxham, chairman and founder of Urban Splash, one of property’s most progressive developers, believes a sustainable building is a long-lasting one. He contrasts Victorian warehouses, now in their third lives as apartments having previously been converted to offices, with some of the highly insulated buildings of today which have design lives of 30 years. Bloxham also dismisses photovoltaics and windmills as ‘tokenism’, preferring geothermal energy which he claims is more cost effective.

Let’s assume you’ve got an enlightened client who, like you, can see the bigger picture. Where do you begin? It would be great if there was a sustainability bible… but there isn’t. The BRE’s Green Guide and its BREEAM and EcoHomes – soon to be replaced by the Code for Sustainable Homes – assessment tools (see right) are good starting points, although as alluded to below you can play the system.

‘BREEAM drives you in roughly the right direction,’ says Williams. ‘It’s a good basis for covering the aspects of the building’s design – if you ignore the weightings.’

Being a slave to BREEAM, however, can lead to an unsustainable solution. Bob Lewis, principle sustainability consultant with Taylor Woodrow Technology, asks what the point is of installing timber-framed windows to get the best BREEAM rating when you know people will replace them with PVC in a couple of years?

Some are uncomfortable with the fact that some materials which use petrochemicals can get an A rating in the Green Guide, which then counts towards points in a BREEAM or EcoHomes rating. Kristian Steele, co-author of the Green Guide at BRE, points out that this is a complex area, where gut instinct doesn’t necessarily give the right answer. ‘We would advocate a more informed debate to the procurement process and one which does not blacklist something simply because it comes from petroleum sources,’ says Steele.

To design a sustainable building architects have to suppress their egos and do something simple

Rab Bennetts

Many design decisions which impact on sustainability are already made by the time a contractor is brought on board. But even then, procurement decisions can be important. Contractors at the forefront of sustainable thinking have developed their own tools for assessing products, looking at factors such as buildability, cost, whole life costs and maintenance issues.

It is not simply a matter of choosing the ‘right’ product, as the window frame example above illustrates. Lewis also gives an example of a project where the client was keen to use recycled aggregate in the concrete. But when the source turned out to be two hours away, the most sustainable choice was to modify the mix to include PFA and GGBS, reducing the embodied energy by 50%.

Taylor Woodrow has developed software from the finance industry which uses multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), to inform its choices. Everyone involved in the project weights the different criteria and the software allows them to see how changing the weightings impacts on the outcome. On one project the evaluation of offsite systems showed that if logistics was the most important consideration, Volumetric came top.

The downside to this tool is that it requires getting all involved parties together, which can be tricky. ‘Some project managers are going for the simple tool, just the spread sheet and using that to decide whether or not it’s a big enough decision to go to the software level,’ says Lewis.

Carillion uses an option appraisal system which takes many factors – including sustainability – into account. Carillion has long been a champion of sustainability, having taken on board a system called The Natural Step (TNS), developed by Forum for the Future. Using this system, Carillion works with its suppliers to improve the sustainability of their products. ‘You can’t just accept what a manufacturer says on its marketing material,’ says Carillion building economist Jas Dhami. ‘The Natural Step challenges you to go deeper and deeper into how the product is made before you specify it. You always get a different answer.’

Dhami wouldn’t touch vinyl, although it gets an A rating in the Green Guide. ‘It’s totally unsustainable, it’s not recyclable, you can’t do anything with it,’ he says. All Carillion’s hospitals – and now some schools – have lino floors because when it’s done with it can be incinerated or left to decompose naturally.

With each project, Carillion challenges its suppliers to do better. With ICI Paints, for example, it’s rethinking the way paint is delivered to avoid plastic container waste, looking at 500-litre containers which can be decanted into kettles which the painters will own and keep.

Dhami is developing a matrix tool which will colour-code the different parts of a product’s manufacture and life cycle, highlighting which parts aren’t sustainable. And Carillion is working with Forum for the Future and ICI Paints on a ‘quick and easy’ lifecycle analysis tool which will use a series of questions to determine the relative sustainability impact of products.

So what are we to make of the government’s latest hobby horse, the zero carbon home? Will it lead to more box ticking or will it advance sustainable thinking?

The general concensus seems to be that it is a step in the right direction, but that there is a bigger picture. ‘BRE has concerns around the idea of a zero carbon house,’ says Steele. ‘But we see it as a great opportunity to address the issue of carbon change. We want to try to work with the government to identify ways to work through this not only to achieve zero carbon, but so that stakeholders don’t trip up on other issues.’

Some developers will do the bare minimum to achieve zero carbon, or a reasonable rating in the Code for Sustainable Homes or BREEAM. But once things move on, they’ll be struggling to keep up. ‘You can take the tick in the box approach and get away with it for a while,’ says Lewis. ‘But you have to be geared up and ready for what’s coming next. That’s the only sensible approach.’