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More rotten vegetables have been thrown at the BREEAM rating this week. First off in a reader's rant on the BSJ website Keith Calder from Meinhart has a pop at the measurement tool as part of a wider point on the misuse of the word sustainable. And in today's Property Week the debate about how much the rating is concerned with carbon and energy is again raised. The latter article quotes Faber Maunsell director Ant Wilson: "There are a lot of developments that do remarkably well because they are in city centres on a brownfield site, but the energy consumption is atrocious."
I think Calder's points are strong ones - beware the laziness of using words such as BREEAM and sustainable when beneath the surface the reality of the building, product or development is far from it. He defines BREEAM as offering harm reduction rather than truly sustainable development - ie projects that are not fossil fuel hungry.
The Property Week piece balances the criticism with an explanation of the steps the BRE is taking to meet concerns that energy is not addressed strongly enough in BREEAM. And Martin Townsend expressed the willingness for the BRE to listen to the industry more in shaping the future evolution of BREEAM at a Building conference I chaired last month. "We want to bring more transparency to the process" he said.
The interesting question hanging over this BRE-bashing is the future of BREEAM related to a Code for non-domestic buildings (no-one has thought of a catchy title for that yet). Casey alluded to this in a post last month cheekily wondering whether a rift was developing between the UK Green Building Council and the BRE.
When I asked Townsend whether a new code would spell the death of BREEAM at the conference he hinted strongly that the changes that the BRE are making to it will make its rating the de facto code. Let's see about that. What I can't see repeated is the domestic code scenario where the government took over the Ecohomes standards, incorporating it into the new code. It was a painful process - hence for non-domestic buildings the talk is 'open source'. As long as the projects hits certain outputs you can pick the standard you want to achieve it. Will that really work?
Any news from Martin on what BREEAM Green Star is? I've emailed him but no reply yet...
Posted by: mel | 08 August 2008 at 09:28 PM