Post Session - Week 10

Post-Session Week 10

Building a low-carbon house - more stars or Life Cycle Design by Alex Bruce 








MORE REFLECTION


So I had another read of this article after my post on Moodle, and decided to write some more on it.

The article puts forward some great points and some very alarming ones. Reading that the average households' impact / occupant / year is 39 times greater than what is theoretically "sustainable" is pretty scary stuff. It's interesting to see from the graph that, on average, a house can achieve a ten star performance rating just by reducing its thermal demands. Admittedly this is the focus of NatHERS but it's clear that we should be focusing on much, much more. Even the fact that all you need is 6 star rating to build, i.e. a 10% below average reduction in carbon emissions, doesn't really really seem like enough.

Australia is one of the few countries where you can actually buy one and two star rated appliances, like fridges. So all those companies that make those fridges send them down under. This is something we need to stop - kill the demand and kill the production.

LCD is definitely something that all new home owners should be considering when building their first home. But how do we educate milions on this? Does require legislation? It's nice to believe that everyone should be concerned about this, but the sad reality is they're not.