Britain’s top engineers are urging the government to stop buildings being demolished, as the co-Author of a new report steered by the Royal Academy of Engineering, Prof. Rebecca Lunn concluded that: ‘Our biggest failure is that we build buildings, then we knock them down and throw them away. We must stop doing this.’
… a new way of thinking is needed before planning new homes, factories, roads and bridges….
The BBC writes:
Making bricks and steel creates vast amounts of CO2, with cement alone causing 8% of global emissions.
They say the construction industry should where possible re-use buildings, employ more recycled material, and use machinery powered by clean fuels.
They are concerned about “embodied emissions”…
They believe that unlike carbon from aircraft, vehicles and gas boilers, embodied emissions are not in people’s minds.
They suspect few people realise there’s a carbon impact from, for instance, building a home extension.
The report, steered by the Royal Academy of Engineering, said a new way of thinking is needed before planning new homes, factories, roads and bridges.
Prof Rebecca Lunn from Strathclyde University, one of the report’s authors, said: “Our biggest failure is that we build buildings, then we knock them down and throw them away. We must stop doing this.”
Fellow author, Mike Cook, adjunct professor at Imperial College, challenged the government’s £27bn road-building programme because of the embodied emissions created to obtain the concrete and tarmac, as well as the use of very polluting machines to construct the highways…
A spokesperson for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) responded to a request from BBC News for a comment by stating that the UK was a “world leader in tackling climate change”….
… The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) estimates that 35% of the lifecycle carbon from a typical office development is emitted before the building is even opened. The figure for residential premises is 51%.
The report has heartened the Architects’ Journal, which has been campaigning against any unnecessary demolition…
