Sustainability Updates

A few items of relevant news have landed onto my computer this week - all make great reading and illustrate the change we are or will see in our industries:
CO-OPERATIVE BANK OPENS NEW ‘GREEN’ BRANCH
In fact the Cooperative Group and Bank are going one further than being Carbon Neutral - with commitments to be [...]

Major Developer in Green Pledge

Hot on the heels of my post yesterday questioning targets for our building sector is the announcement from British Land:
Three reports came through to my PC today:
Britain’s ‘biggest landlord’ to go carbon neutral 
One of the United Kingdom’s largest property developers has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2008/9, according to a report published on Wednesday.
In [...]

Are you being trained for the worls you will inherit? - the 2030 Challenge

The above title came from the recently received e-newsletter from the USA 2030 Challenge. The 2030 challenge seeks to reduce carbon emissions from new and existing buildings by 2030. The newsletter and the 2030 challenge makes for excellent reading, in particular:

targets set for each building sector - new and existing
informative background information on climate [...]

New Links

I have added two new links to the blogroll panel to the right.
Elemental - a mine of interesting and informative information and sustainable solutions for the built environment from Mel Starr, a Sustainability Consultant based in Leeds.
Dave’s Diary - Dave Hampton is a carbon coach, committed to reduction of carbons. Read his posts [...]

Green Property

If you didn’t get the Observer property section on Sunday it could be well worth tracking down.  The whole section was devoted to Green Property issues which will be of interest to those in the housing market as well as us as individual house owners.  (I will post the links here when I can find [...]

An Inconvenient Truth for us?

It is sad that at a time when climate change and carbon management in our industry is in the spot light the Lancashire Best Practice Club has had to postpone a sustainability event due to low take up and apparent lack of interest.
Is this typical of our attitude and approach to the whole carbon ‘thing’ [...]

Event Postponed

The Sustainability event scheduled for 22 March 2007 has unfortunatley been postponed.
Watch this space for updates.
Our next events are:
March 27th CDM - UCLAN  Harris Park Preston
April 26th Bidding to Win  - UCLAN  Harris Park Preston
You can download more details and faxback forms from the Events Page
These events are likely to be very popular - book [...]

PFI versus PPP in Liverpool BSF

News on the Contract Journal web today reports that Liverpool BSF (Building Schools for the Future) is to take a PPP route rather than PFI
I recall this debate taking place at a previous LBPC event on the Blackburn area BSF, which as we now know took the PFI route.  The concern amongst LBPC members was [...]

Impact on Bad Practice

I was fortunate to participate in an interesting event with Elevate last week looking at the social and diversity issues within our industry - and focusing on the impact of bad practice, ie safety
There was reference to Life on Mars ( the TV cop show set in 1973) with comments that maybe we havent moved [...]

Climate Change

There seems to be a lot happening in politics and environmental circles this week. Just what does all this mean for construction and facilities management. I am reading the latest draft bill to determine that and will feedback through here.
Two very relevant themes that have jumped out though - zero carbon housing, in [...]