You could have come away from last week’s Ecobuild conference and exhibition in London thoroughly depressed. A number of the speakers predicted a pretty bleak future for us all if we keep breeding, consuming and building the way we are now. The bleakest said we didn’t even have a future if we stuck to our current track.
Liz Reason of the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB) said that, not only were our current consumer habits taking us all to hell in a handcart, the measures being introduced by government to improve building energy efficiency were just tinkering at the edges.
To make a real dent on the problems, she said, we should aim for the AECB’s emissions “silver standard”, which means cutting annual CO2 generation of the average UK home from the present 6 tonnes to 1.5. Ultimately we should aim for a house that generates just 0.3 tonnes a year.
After all of that, you might have expected visitors to leave Ecobuild wailing “we’re doomed” like Private Fraser in Dad’s Army. What prevented this was that many of the speakers and companies and organisations showing their wares in the exhibition put forward practical solutions to the environmental challenges. And encouragingly many featured timber, either at their heart, or as a key component.
Timber frame and wood-based panel construction were strongly represented and there was an afternoon of presentations on timber construction technology moderated by the UK Timber Frame Association.
The concrete and steel construction sectors were also out in force, highlighting the sustainability of their latest developments. But while they will undoubtedly remain very big business, there was a clear realisation that they will not continue to be the totally dominant force they were in the 20th century. The architectural and construction sectors are gradually fronting up to the seriousness of the environmental questions we face – and they’re increasingly realising that greater use of timber and wood products in building provides one of the serious answers.
