SUSTAINABILITY 087


What are some of the biggest obstacles you face in delivering the most sustainable projects possible, and what could be done to make it easier to deliver a more sustainable end result?


One of the biggest barriers to innovation in terms of low- carbon design is warranties and liability, for fire in particular. With the big housebuilders for instance, they are not going to build anything that is not NHBC certified, and that means that we have a reduced pot of what we can use. Don’t get me wrong, that still leaves plenty of fantastic products, but it means that we’re always a little behind the curve, whereas if we’re building a one-off house, we can do all kinds of exciting things. So going back to our very first question, when it comes to truly natural materials, these are perhaps typically more flammable. We would never recommend a product that is flammable as such, but some products are perhaps on the borderline of whether they char. So it becomes a question of how liability works in this respect. If that could be more nimble, we would be in a much better place.


Has the pandemic created an opportunity for businesses to ‘reset’ their approach to carbon neutrality, or has the cost of lockdown made it more difficult to achieve the investment necessary for long-term sustainability initiatives?


Interestingly, with the scale of change, moving to keep up with the sustainability drive has been seen as much easier, so I think a lot of organisations have sustainability leads or a head of sustainability or equivalent. We see that within practices, within clients and within developer bodies. And they increasingly have a voice. Tere was a gradual shift anyway from companies doing things like B Corp where you have to have a head of sustainability. But then all of a sudden there has been this huge shake-up, and many more companies were able to hook some of these new ideas into their plans for coming out the other side of it. We have seen quite a bit of this, whereas I don’t think we have seen anything that has gone the opposite direction and turned away from sustainability, which is really good. fcbstudios.com


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