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VIEWS


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A new ‘independent’ database of products has been designed to help specifiers substitute and reduce the use of plastic in buildings they are designing, and thereby tackle a major sustainability challenge. Architect Gareth Abrahams explains how the Changing Streams initiative is working with academia on the way forward


O


ver the last 10 years, there has been a growing awareness that the buildings we live and work in play a fundamental role in achieving our sustainability ambitions. We can see this in the Building Regulations, which have seen many revisions to Part L over this period. Each of these revisions has been used to encourage us to design buildings that perform better by retaining the energy used for heating and cooling. As architects, we have become adept at specifying materials according to their thermal conductivity, and their capacity to fit together as part of


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an airtight thermal envelope. The problem, we argue at Changing Streams, is that our focus has been governed too firmly by the way materials behave and perform, and less by what they are made of. Or, put differently, we have been increasingly sensitive to what materials do and less aware of what they are.


There are signs that things are changing. When we talk about operational energy and carbon, many of us are also referring to embodied carbon. Indeed, this link between operational and embodied carbon is now part of the RIBA’s sustainability targets,


If current trends persist, plastic pollution in construction could triple by 2060, surpassing 1.1 billion tons of waste


along with potable water use. This wider conception of sustainable building design is important if we are to achieve a more balanced approach to national carbon zero targets. But these changes in behaviour and


ADF JULY/AUGUST 2024


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