More sustainability issues to address

Choosing Sustainable Materials and Business Operations: Our Path to Low-Impact Architecture

As we continue our journey towards greater sustainability, there are still more sustainability issues to address. We’re focusing on a crucial aspect of building design: material selection. Here’s how we’re prioritising low-impact materials and moving towards a more circular approach to construction. 

Embodied Energy and Healthier Building Material Choices 

We’ve learned that many common building materials have a high environmental cost, both in terms of energy consumption during production and their potential for releasing harmful VOCs. Concrete, steel, and petrochemical-based insulation are just a few examples. 

To minimise these impacts, we’re prioritising materials with lower embodied energy and a smaller environmental footprint. These materials often have a long history of use in traditional construction, such as sustainably sourced timber, stone, lime-based products, and natural insulation materials. 

We are doing our own retrofit [albeit part time!] 

As homeowners of a fairly typical 1930s house, we understand the challenges and rewards of retrofitting for energy efficiency. While our home is unlikely to ever meet certified Passivhaus standards, we’ve already seen significant improvements in energy use, comfort, and indoor air quality. This experience informs our work with clients, emphasising achievable upgrades and long-term strategies for sustainability. 

Towards a Circular Economy 

We’re also prioritising materials that can be easily recycled at the end of a building’s life, contributing to a circular economy. While some materials like plastics and sealants remain unavoidable, we strive to minimise their use and to seek out bio-based alternatives where possible. 

Sustainable Business Operations: Next Steps 

As you can tell we are probably quite clued up about how to design and construct low environmental impact buildings although there is room for improvement. However, we are not as clued up about how to operate the business sustainably and this needs a major improvement. 

We need to operate a successful business that has a low environmental impact, to raise awareness and try to work with customers, collaborators, manufacturers, suppliers and other stakeholders, who also share this vision of low environmental impact. 

We are intending to conduct a full business process audit and assessment to identify where improvements can be made. 

Our Ongoing Commitment 

We’re committed to continuously learning and adapting, taking steps – both big and small – towards a more sustainable future. We believe that every choice we make, as designers and as a business, can make a positive difference. 

We have established some sustainability goals year on year, you can read more by clicking here. 

Please keep checking back to see our progress.