A green gold mine

Until recently there was a dearth of examples of sustainable best practice. Cabe, for one, complained in the summer of the lack of examplar housing schemes since Bill Dunster’s Bedzed scheme in south London.

Thankfully things are changing, as Building’s new Best Practice pages reveal. The pages, developed in conjunction with the Construction Confederation, contain dozens of case studies of sustainable best practice arranged under three headings: waste, energy use and communities.

Details of many of these schemes have not been released before, and there’s a good chance that they deal with issues that you may be struggling with.

These case studies aren’t just about wind turbines and photovoltaics, either. Projects range from civil engineer Barhale’s use of nappies to capture oil leaks to the involvement of schoolchildren from the community on a schools PFI in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.

The Best Practice pages sit in Building’s new sustainability channel, which carries case studies on buildings such as Pines Calyx, which was named small project of the year at the recent Building Sustainability awards.

Case studies are being added all the time and new this week we have the details of a church in Rochester, Kent, which has recently cut its carbon footprint by 60%. The site also features a timeline for sustainable industry targets and all the dates for the introduction of new legislation.

The timeline will contains links to the original documents.

Also worth looking out for is the latest instalment in Turner & Townsend’s glossery. Part three features watery terms, and includes the definitions of pulse metering, blackwater and butts.

(Read it or, by 2050, Kent might look like this …)