If you want to know what the focus will be this year for the many – and may we say, growing number – of businesses engaged in creating a more sustainable built environment, it’s hard to go past the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council which is one of Australia’s few (or only?) umbrella group that brings together a united voice across all the sectors and the associations who pedal hard – or sometimes soft – for a better result in our buildings and cities.
So, what this crowd thinks is probably an accurate reflection of what its countless members are working on – whether it’s strategy or investment on the ground.
Executive director Alison Scotland says her 40-odd members have identified three new priorities for the year: accelerating decarbonisation, enhancing resilience and the transition to a circular economy.
It’ll all be tricky, but on decarbonisation, there’s enormous work being done, and as we reported last week, we’ve got a grid that’s close to being decarbonised in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria.
Enhancing resilience makes exquisite sense given the climate that’s arrived and howling with anger around the planet; how we retrofit out building, commercial, private and public needs to be a major priority and probably not one that needs to cost an arm and a leg.
Quite often, the fixes can be clever rather than expensive and if the feds and other governments could possibly bring themselves to think holistically, maybe cheaper than picking up the cost of failure through health and social impacts.
But the latter one, a circular economy, is tricky. It’s been bubbling away, but mostly on the back burner and because Scotland says it needs to be wrapped up in the regeneration of nature, tough. Anything to do with restoring or protecting nature is tough. Maybe because our entire economy and society are based on extracting bounties from nature – until it’s got no more to give.
Which is when things get nasty. Much like the behaviour of humans when they’re exploited.
But how do we get there?
That’s the big conundrum that’s been taxing the minds of the most talented. How to repair nature, whether nature credits are a thing or not. Whether we can fully restore to the original or some harmless organic state, all the things we take to be comfortable with.
In our video interview with Lasse Lind of 3XN recently, we heard that design for disassembly is not as easy as putting it on the wishlist.
But Scotland is thrilled that finally the challenge has been firmly planted on the agenda.
As we said, these priorities are not made up in some bar over a few whiskeys; they’re cleaved from industry members who say this is what we want to work on. There’s heft.
Scotland says it’s been on the periphery of industry concerns for a long time – but we need to call an end to “end of life” thinking for buildings, or materials that pass their perceived use by date or fall victim to new fashions.
She says the key to getting that formula right is to value products at their highest possible value. And that’s clearly not dollars she’s talking about.
Another project with promise is Scotland’s work with an organisation that is not a member: a collaboration with the Housing Industry Association.
While the HIA is not a natural cultural fit with ASBEC, this project is very much in alignment. It’s to improve the skill levels in the residential construction sector.
The goal is to get better outcomes on our national ambitions.
Right now Scotland says, “I feel there is a gap between policy ambition and execution.”
The old trope of “a man, a dog and a ute” is redundant – or needs to be.
Even some of the volume builders are not informed enough to recognise what’s needed, she says.
Let’s look at the National Construction Code. Whenever it’s raised to its next edition, or tries to be raised, there’s an almighty cacophony of protest.
Trust us, it comes straight from the bloke, the ute and his gorgeous dog, who we can’t blame because it’s there to be cute and diffuse the situation.
What causes the most friction, says Scotland, is not so much the call to improve standards but that the old guard is trying to do this by grafting the new codes onto an old system.
Can you imagine trying to run a building information modelling (BIM) program on an old Commodore 64 that you never threw out?
Not going to happen.
But this is exactly what a lot of the industry is trying do.
The funny thing is that achieving a lot of the better outcomes comes not from tacking on sustainability onto old models, but by switching around your orientation, so you don’t have the living rooms facing the western sun, or perhaps moving the bedrooms to another location.
“It’s why they’re saying it costs a stupid amount of money [ to meet new NCC codes].”
Queensland
Scotland has another challenge on the books this year, Queensland, and she’s working soon with that state’s Productivity Commissioner
Angela Moody is to resolve some conflicts and duplication in planning laws.
“They’re genuinely trying to fix real layers of duplication,” she says. “It’s not always a fight against minimum standards.”
Sadly, that’s exactly what we see a lot of.
The ABCB
Another issue on the agenda is the review of the Australian Building Codes Board by the federal Treasury, which has been greeted with surprise among industry players, as we found late last year. What does Treasury know about building codes?
There are now rising calls for the ABCB to be its own independent authority.
Scotland says some of the bureaucratic entanglement perceived in the ABCB is because of demands that any change to the NCC be put through a very expensive wringer. Namely, a RIS or regulatory impact statement.
This is designed to reveal the cost of any new measures – even if the benefits are self evident, for instance, that greater energy efficiency will save the householder money and trailing costs.
We suspect the RIS, which can break the six figure mark, and is mandated and bitterly defended by those who also want to maintain the status quo – is forced to place the costs borne by the industry on a higher plane than the costs borne by the poor sods who have to live in the shoddy houses that result.
Anything other than changing the orientation or placement of the way the house is designed.