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Jerry Tate of Jerry Tate Architects on Ecobuild

What really struck me at Ecobuild this year was the sheer scale of the show and the number of exhibitors, seminars exhibitions and events which one can see. There is simply not enough time in one day to be able to take everything in and I was left wishing I had planned it out better before going! For example I remember last year seeing a retrofit solution to make a brick wall breathable, and this year (now that I need it) I could not find the manufacturers for toffee! The positive side of this of course is that a sustainable attitude towards construction is becoming quite mainstream now, and once again this year there were a number of products which solved problems we have been discovering in our day to day work.

Key to many of our problems is that when doing retrofit work on a tight site the standard renewable solutions are simply not viable. For example in tight urban sites where digging is difficult it is hard to justify good water management systems as we cannot justify the payback against the cost. So I was really struck with a product from Halstead Rain who make wall mounted rainwater recycling butts for tight urban sites.

The tanks can be as big as you have wallspace available, the one they had at the show was 500 litres, which is not huge compared to say the 5,000 litre tank we would normally try to put in a house, but the tank can be provide greywater for a much lower price than the standard type systems when space is a premium. I liked it as it solved a problem we have actually had (too late mind but there you go).

Another problem we sometimes have, especially again with retrofit where we cannot control the original building massing, is making sure we have good daylighting provision to reduce energy demand. We quite often use a sort of ‘cheat’ with cheap and cheerful sun tubes that every contractor on the planet knows about but can really change a space. However this year I saw a product which can direct daylight all over a building and round corners using fibre-optics which was fantastic! It is called Parans and is supplied by a company called Limitless. I think the product is made somewhere clever like Switzerland.

Basically heliotropic lens on the roof of any building track the sun and direct it into fibreoptics. These are then used to make ‘daylight’ fittings all over the building, either spots or ambient lights. This is fantastic technology which could ensure all electric lighting is not used during the day at all. A bit pricey right now at £5,000 per lens array which can power about 12 light ‘outlets’ but the cost is bound to come down over time I hope.

One thing which winds me up a lot on site is the amount of waste generated by temporary protective measures, for example I seethe when a floor finish is put down a week or two early and then twenty sheets of hardboard are wasted on protecting it. So it was nice to see a flooring manufacturer thinking about re-usable protection. Florprotec made by www.flooringprotection.co.uk is made from 95% recycled plastic and can be used and re-used on different sites, so although it costs a little bit more a contractor can use it again and again to re-coup initial costs. This is great as it is easy to ignore things which will not be left in the final building and it has to make cost sense to ‘persuade’ a contractor of their worth!

It was also nice to see products which had caught my eye a few years ago mature into great commercial products which one could really see being rolled out in a widespread way. For example the Green Bottle Unit re-launched as Eluna (www.eluna.org.uk ), now has a really good range of standard 100% recycled glass tiles, as well as their bespoke design department. There are a lot of recycled glass products about but not all of them are as pure in their process as others, and I really like the idea of installing glass tiles in London, from a manufacturer in East London, using materials generated from restaurant waste in London!

In the same way Lime Technologies announced at the show that their lime and hemp wall construction system, Hemcrete, has got BBA approval (www.limetechnology.co.uk ). I could not helped but be thrilled by this as it is such an appealing product from its local production techniques, its low-tech installation process (poke it with a stick and leave it overnight), its carbon sequesterisation and even the fact that it looks like a building version of All-Bran! Not to sound bigoted but I really enjoy the idea of making well insulated airtight buildings without necessarily using the Germanic techniques of pre-fabrication….

Although I really did enjoy the show this year I ended up feeling a bit dazed by the end, and many of the people I bumped into looked similarly shell-shocked. Given the scale of this industry now I am not sure how to solve this problem other than to split the show up which would defeat the whole purpose. Perhaps if somehow Ecobuild judged potential exhibitors on their genuine green credentials, and did not let in those who failed? But where would that end……..

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Filed under: Sustainable products