Why do we need “green refurbishment”?

Scientists, meteorologists and even the government are all in agreement: there is absolutely no doubt that the UK’s weather patterns will change considerably over the coming decades. Indeed, the effects of climate change are already becoming noticeable year on year.

Most of our 22 million homes were not built to cope effectively with these new conditions – warmer, wetter winters, hotter, drier summers and increased pockets of unpredictable, extreme weather occurrences. Most homes are simply “energy inefficient”.

While addressing these problems, in order to minimise further damage to our environment and stem the tide of further ecological disasters, we must also do everything possible to reduce our future CO2 emissions.

Many people think of gas-guzzling cars or cheap flights when asked to consider carbon emissions but in reality much of the problem is closer to home, or indeed in the home. Heating and lighting buildings generates half of Britain's CO2 emissions while the manufacture of building materials accounts for a further 10%.

And it is not just carbon emissions that are the problem. The construction industry generates one third of all the waste in Britain while 20% of new building materials on the average building site are simply thrown away at the end of the job.

That is 13 million tonnes of new material thrown away each year.

Just as worryingly, energy costs are rising fast. One in six households in the UK are now surviving in a state of “fuel poverty”, a situation in which more than 10% of their disposable income is spent on keeping themselves warm. As fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, these costs are only going to increase further.

So, what can we do?

One answer is for everybody to build themselves a brand new eco-build, examples of which are frequently lauded on TV programmes such as Grand Designs, using the very latest “green” technologies, products and gadgets.

However, for most of us, this isn’t a realistic option. Even if the money was available to undertake such a project, many people have an attachment to the home they have invested in and have no desire to leave it. Others may need to live in a specific location. Others have no choice over the home in which they live.

Besides, in the UK there are currently nearly 300,000 empty homes in the private sector alone. Knocking these down to provide space for proposed new ecobuildings would seem to be a short sighted (and thoroughly wasteful) solution.

Our solution, then, brings us to the first principles of a greener lifestyle: to reuse and repair.

We can make unobtrusive, swift and cost effective improvements to our existing property stock, using materials with low embodied energy and techniques designed to prevent the waste of energy. This will immediately reduce our impact on the environment and also go some way to reducing the rising cost of energy bills.

We don’t have the time to rebuild, so we need to make the best of what we have.