The health and safety of occupants is of paramount importance.
- Engage early with contractors to plan deconstruction scenarios and reduce waste sent to landfill.. - Adopt circular economy strategies for deconstruction and reuse, including:.o Upcycling materials to put back in the local supply chain.. o Adopting the principles of buildings as material banks, urban mining, and use of material passports.. o Using bolted connections and smaller structural grids, which facilitate disassembly, cutting (if needed) and deconstruction.. Use membranes to decouple the slab from the screed and explore alternatives, such as dry screeds, sand and gravel screeds, floor dense boards, particle boards or cardboard and sand layers.. Procurement of timber and distance.
Currently, most timber used in the UK for construction is manufactured and imported from mainland Europe.Depending on the distance, this can have an impact on the total carbon emissions.. Our response is to:.- Conduct detailed whole-life carbon analysis of buildings, including harvesting, processing, manufacturing, and transportation to end-of-life disposal.. - Prioritise locally produced engineered timber and strategically select timber that can be shipped instead of transported by road.. At Bryden Wood, we have explored local sourcing of engineered timber.
The results show that distance is very important and the carbon emissions from northern France, Belgium and western Germany are relatively small.In the case of Spain or Sweden, even though these materials can be shipped by boat (lower carbon emissions per nautical kilometre), the distances are so large that they amount to more than double the emissions from road only transportation.
However, they are still small compared to A1-A3.. Accounting for biogenic carbon capture when carrying out a whole life carbon assessment.
Biogenic carbon capture is the process whereby trees absorb and store carbon dioxide during growth.Digitising the planning system will help us to start producing policies based on real time evidence.
Policies could change over a very short time.Changes to market conditions, developer contributions, or the cost of land could impact the number, or location, of homes originally desired.
Digitising planning would keep things much more reliable and up to date..There would also be an opportunity to test more ideas before deciding which policy is the right one, and it’s hoped that by digitising the planning system we’ll also be able to do scenario testing.