Zero Ambitions Podcast

Jeff invited Mhairi Grant, co founder of award-winning architectural practice Paper Igloo, to join us to talk about the challenges of ensuring that one's ideas for sustainable design actually make their way through to the construction phase.

The subject was sparked by a conversation she and Jeff had about lessons learned from a flawed project (that we discuss) and what it takes to ensure that our best, or even just easiest ideas are delivered upon in the build phase.

Usually, we'd think about specifying a project in a way that can resist value engineering, but sometimes the project can be scuppered by something as simple as an easily avoidable comprehension issue.

Notes from the show

• Mhairi Grant on LinkedIn
• A link to Scotland's Passivhaus Consultation: Building Regulations: Determining the principles for a Scottish equivalent to the Passivhaus standard: Stage 1 consultation
• The Paper Igloo website
• Paper Igloo on Instagram
• The Passive House Plus feature on Mhairi's own home in Stirlingshire

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [email protected]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

Can we address the decarbonisation of homes by focusing on health? That's the mission that Jenny Danson has set for herself in establishing Healthy Homes Hub, and it's a question that manages to subvert Betteridge's Law of headlines, too.

Healthy Homes Hub is a network, built around an online platform, that's dedicated to transforming the way people experience social housing, and its environmental impact, by creating healthier housing environments. Comprising a series of eight dedicated hubs that cover everything from policy and finance, to retrofit and air quality, the platform enable easy access to important information, insights, and thought leadership.

Jenny has over 25 years of experience in social housing, as a supplier and client-side, driving innovation, delivery and improving lives so she knows what she's talking about.

The project was borne of a frustration with seeing time and effort wasted as people across the sector carry out the same kinds of work, repeatedly, starting from scratch when they could share resources and pool experience. In a sector where capacity is in short supply this time could be easily put to better use.

We talk through the challenges faced by the sector and how a focus on people and health can be used to drive us towards delivering on decarbonisation targets, but train our attention on outcomes for the people living in the 'building assets' not just the performance of the fabric and technology that comprises their home.

While it's explicitly aimed at the social housing sector, the platform offers a wealth of information resources and sharing of experience that could be useful far beyond the provision of social housing.

Notes from the show

• The Healthy Homes Hub website
• Jenny on LinkedIn
• Healthy Homes Hub on LinkedIn
• Operational excellence in social housing - a roundtable readout

Those ventilation papers that Jeff mentioned

1. Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality in Part F 2006 Homes (BD 2702) by S. McKay, D. Ross, I. Mawditt, and S. Kirk (2010)
2. Occupant Interactions and Effectiveness of Natural Ventilation Strategies in Contemporary New Housing in Scotland, UK by Tim Sharpe, Paul Farren, Stirling Howieson, Paul Tuohy, Jonathan McQuillan

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [email protected]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

Apologies for the delay, the lost podcast has been returned and is ready for release.

'Don't Waste Buildings' should be a straightforward proposition. It seems obvious. Especially so in the face of the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the business of the built environment is not yet on board completely.

Our guests for this episode are the founders of UK-based campaign group Don't Waste Buildings, Will Hurst (Architects Journal) Leanne Tritton (Ing Media), and Richard Nelson (Abyss Global).

They're a group who are seeking to remedy this challenge by pressuring government and persuading business to both do better. They're doing some really interesting work and they're new, so they need support.

Please note: the graphic we refer can be found here (about 15 minutes in). I'll update this reference with a link to the Passive House Plus article once it's published.

Notes from the show

• Don't Waste Buildings on LinkedIn (the best starting point)
• The Don't Waste Buildings holding page (a proper website is imminent, so keep an eye on www.dontwastebuildings.com)
• Will Hurst on LinkedIn
• Leanne Tritton on LinkedIn
• Richard Nelson on LinkedIn
• Zero Ambitions - Construction's embodied carbon problem: how do we incentivise retrofit over 'demolish and rebuild', with Joseph Kilroy (CIOB)
• The AJ article by Kunle Barker that Will refers to: Without architects’ close expert involvement, government plans to retrofit millions of homes will be prone to unintended consequences such as mould
• Something about that 'burning fossil fuels to save the planet' nonsense that Jeff was referring to Future Energy Scenarios 2023 Released, sadly he couldn't find the actual article he remembered
• He found this as well: Ability of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) to generate negative emissions
• The Indy Johar LinkedIn post that Will refers to
• LRB's James Butler article about Grenfell: ‘This much evidence, still no charges’

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [email protected]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION...

A long-overdue episode with friend of the show, Lloyd Alter, about a blog he wrote and his book "The Story of Upfront Carbon".

We get into the language of sustainability, carbon, and lots of the words that are ubiquitous in this space (sustainability and the built environment, obviously).

We get into the sustainability of travel, to some extent too,

Lloyd's book: The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a Life of Just Enough Offers a Way Out of the Climate Crisis

• Buy it from the independent bookshop website (you can switch regions)
• You can also buy it from Amazon, but only if you really have no other option

InnovateUK – Net Zero Heat Open Day
A showcase of IUK innovation lab projects including Transform-ER

• Thursday 3rd October, online, 9am-12pm
• Register here

Notes from the show

• "Sustainable design is dead, long live regenerative design!" from Lloyd's Substack, Upfront Carbon
• A sustainable architecture Google Images search
• A regenerative architecture Google Images search
• That absurd vertical forest building in Milan
• COP26: Sufficiency Should be First - Yamina Saheb
• We Have to Put Sufficiency First in a Low-Carbon World - Lloyd's old Treehugger blog about the SER framework
• ZAP episode 144 - “Use less stuff”: embodied carbon, value chains, and the potential for change in the Declaration de Chaillot. With Lloyd Alter (Carbon Upfront), Kelly Alvarez Doran (Ha/f Climate Design), and Will Arnold (The Institution of Structural Engineers)

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [email protected]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

This episode is all about a retrofit programme gone wrong in Preston and the effort required to fix it.

It's a story that was covered in the pages of Passive House Plus back in 2018 under the headline "Disastrous Preston retrofit scheme remains unresolved" and until recently we thought it remained unresolved.

We're joined by Filipe Amarante and Joanna Curtis to talk about the Preston Retrofit Catastrophe and all the work that National Energy Action has been doing to fix the grotesque damage that was wrought on a community in the 2010s. It's a project that's consumed at least four years and—in truth—will require many more to make good.

It's not a hopeless story though. The work NEA has carried out is full of lessons for anyone who works in retrofit to learn. They've taken a worst case scenario—one so bad it's hard to imagine how you could make it any worse—and developed a remediation programme that mitigates the worst of the situation while laying out a best-practice template for how one should approach place-based retrofit programmes.

They're also hosting a NEA webinar about the programme on 10 June: sign up here.

Notes from the show

• The Passive House Plus article: "Disastrous Preston retrofit scheme remains unresolved"
• Filipe on LinkedIn
• Joanna on LinkedIn
• The NEA website
• The NEA's summary report on the project (and video): Warm and Safe Homes in Fishwick
• More photos of the disaster in "When retrofit goes wrong – lessons from Preston", a presentation by Kate de Selincourt, the writer who brought this story to Jeff's attention
• Cathy Come Home on IMDB
• A Taste of Honey on IMDB
• Riff-Raff on IMDB

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff and Dan about Zero Ambitions Partners (the consultancy) for help with positioning and communications strategy, customer/user research and engagement strategy, carbon calculations and EPDs – we're up to all sorts
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd Alter's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**