As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, Britain is a prime historical example of the devastation and destruction caused by unchecked commercial and industrial development. The havoc wreaked on the natural landscape by ill-considered construction projects is still visible in many areas. The country’s construction industry has long disdained or been indifferent to ideas of “sustainable construction”, preferring the ethos of “stack them high and sell them cheap” and tolerating a consummate waste of energy and natural resources. As an article in Habitat International stated in 1995: “The construction industry, together with the materials industries which support it, is one of the major global exploiters of natural resources, both physical and biological ... ”.

Construction projects permeate every aspect of the built environment that underpins Britain’s socio-economic life. The industry has an annual turnover of approximately £100 billion and employs 1.5 million people. Its environmental appetite is staggering: it consumes 260 million tonnes of virgin mineral resources and produces 70 million tonnes of waste every year. Around 13 million tonnes of these unwanted construction materials are dumped in landfill sites, where they swallow over 44,000 megalitres of water every day. The department of trade and industry (DTI) says that just to maintain existing stock the industry “produces about half of UK carbon emissions, and the single biggest action is in improving energy efficiency in new and existing stock”.

Four steps to renewal

Brenda & Robert Vale’s book A Sustainable Path: “The Autonomous House” addressed these issues as far back as 1972, the year of the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Environment; the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 concluded that little had changed. The required knowledge existed, but warnings went unheeded by all shades of political opinion and the industry nationally. The existing building regulations only promote a minimum standard, and necessitate few provisions for strong sustainability.

The OECD claims that the causal link between construction and global climate change is undeniable, and endorses a combative strategy known as “the 4 R’s”. It is a powerful, flexible solution, defined in these four steps:

• reuse (“brownfield sites”): sustainable construction should in the first instance initiate preferential priority to the redevelopment of abandoned or derelict inner-city land, brownfield sites. This is opposed to developing agricultural land, or “greenfield” sites with the consequential loss of biodiversity, and increased pollution as a manifestation created through land-use change
• recycle & reuse construction materials and products from demolition, unused or reclaimed buildings and waste materials. Among these are recycled glass for use as building sand and blast furnace slag as an aggregate in concrete, which would reduce the pressure on natural resources and diminish the dramatic impact of natural resource extraction on the biosphere. If virgin resources are regarded as the earth’s natural capital, water should also be included as a vital and precious resource, ripe for recycling as green, grey and black water recycling as a material consideration
• renewable energy resources: the increased use of biomass for heating and hot water, solar thermal hot-water collectors and photovoltaic cells linked to the national grid and combined heat systems, would all provide long-term renewable energy sources
• replenish: to aid biodiversity, the built environment should be designed to take account of and encourage biodiversity, in order to aid and develop flora and fauna conservation strategies.

A change of route?

The “4 R’s” concept does not involve new technology; nothing in it is cutting-edge or could be classified as untried; all its components have been tried and tested in northern Europe for many years. Together, they place an emphasis on low-carbon solutions to reducing embodied energy and CO2 emissions. As important, they counter the worst effects of anthropogenic global climate change, which David King (the UK government’s chief scientific officer) has called mankind’s greatest challenge.

Yet the UK construction industry has largely scorned these simple advances in favour of the gas-guzzling status quo, with year on year growth in CO2 emissions and continual waste mountains fuelled by a booming construction industry, high levels of imports and a major skill shortage. Recycled materials represent only a small fraction of total annual volumes, and only a handful of architects espouse the use of recycled materials (see www.zedfactory.com, www.bbm-architects.co.uk, and www.gaiagroup.org); ironically their major use is in road construction. Moreover there is a general malaise among construction professionals in taking up the cause of sustainable construction methods.

If change is possible, it needs new, aggressive command-and-control legislation. The European Union’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) could make a marked difference. But Britain’s own government has not shown any urgency to legislate, even though 60% of the country’s built environment is aged and environmental benefits of the EPBD will take over fifty years to emerge.

This political reluctance is aided by bureaucratic confusion: three ministerial departments share environmental responsibilities, and environmental issues have remained for almost forty years as a secondary sub-department within a larger ministry, with the construction minister at a junior rank.

Meanwhile, the construction industry itself seems over-concerned with measurement targets and cost-benefit analysis. The way ahead is for government to incorporate sustainability as a headline policy target with an environment minister at cabinet level, and for the construction industry to unify under a single banner of sustainable principles – with an aim of constructing sustainability instead of excellence. Then, the new direction promised by the “4 R’s” might be realised.