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Two interesting speakers at an event I attended last Friday - John Prewer, who is known as the godfather of prefabrication, and Dr John Barrett from the Stockholm Environment Institute. Prewer not surprisingly offered the benefits of prefab but also added a couple of interesting points - the impression that heavyweight construction was the way to go was "false" (I think I may get him to elaborate on this for Building) and that building below the ground was unsustainable.
He was looking at introducing screwpiles to buildings, so negating the need for using concrete foundations. This means you can turn back the site into agricultural land if needs be and you build it so you are not creating future brownfield land. "Building (with foundations) is a form of pollution in itself," he said.
The presentation from Barrett was a run through some research he has carried out on the relative merits of prefab compared to on-site construction in relation to the Code for Sustainable Homes. I've not had a chance to look at the report in detail but I think it has some valuable facts to pull out. Barrett himself was also pretty candid about just how far a distance we as individuals and businesses had to travel (obviously metaphorically by foot or bicycle) to really get to grips with our collective footprints. "There is no such thing as carbon neutral. There are always carbon emissions somewhere in the supply chain," he said.
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