Fear not specifiers, says Alex Smith. To help meet the barrage of sustainable standards that has been published recently, there is an assortment of green product resources on the internet

A useful one-stop web shop for specifiers raised its virtual shutters this week. The Green Book Live (www.greenbooklive.com) is an online tool based on the BRE’s Green Book, which rates and certifies the environmental performance of construction products.

It includes sustainable tools and databases from around the internet, and there is an alphabetical list of competent persons under the BRE’s carbon calculation scheme. Actually, it’d be more useful to be able to search for consultants by postcode – if you’re called Zebedee Zacharias, you probably won’t get many calls.

Suppliers of renewable energy systems certified under the now-defunct Clear Skies programme are also included, as are those of energy efficient insulation, lighting, glazing and domestic appliances.

Incidentally, the Clear Skies scheme is to be replaced by the UK Microgeneration Certification scheme. I gleaned this information from sister site Red Book Live (www.redbooklive.com), which has details of other certification schemes.

There are other sources of information online. Building’s sister publication Barbour (www.barbour-abi.com) has a huge database of products and suppliers, which includes all manner of specification minutiae.

Postscript

Also on the web is the CDM regulations guidance from ConstructionSkills. To view this, go to www.cskills.org/healthsafety and click on “CDM regulations” and then “guidance”. The guides cater for everybody touched by changes to the regs such as clients, co-ordinators, designers, principal contractors, contractors and workers.

To watch Building’s online seminar on the CDM regs go to www.building.co.uk/webinar