A project piloted at the University of Bradford to create ‘green concrete’ which vastly reduces CO2 production has won a major award. The GreenLegoUse project to create ‘demountable’ concrete blocks has won its category in this year’s Newton Prize Fund awards. The Newton Fund develops science and innovation partnerships that promote
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Near Zero Energy renovation
A new multimillion euro research project which will demonstrate how buildings can be renovated to use ‘near zero energy’ has launched at Brunel University London. Featuring 17 partners from nine European countries and funded by Horizon 2020, the €8.4m project brings together academia and industry to develop a ‘Retrofit Kit’ that can be used to reduce energy consumption by 60-95% in renovated buildings.Read more
The Retrofit Kit will bring together a number of advanced, cost efficient, and energy-saving technologies – including smart windows with pre-heating and cooling technology, ventilation heat recovery, photovoltaic panels, and nature-based technologies – which can be fitted 30% quicker than typical renovations. It’s hoped that implementation of the technologies would have a payback period of under 15 years. Four demonstration sites will be created as part of the project, including one at Brunel, which will offer practical, real-world examples of ‘Near Zero Energy Buildings’ or ‘nZEBs’ retrofit.
Mixed reactions to the third runway announcement at Heathrow
Reacting to today’s vote by MPs in support of a third runway at Heathrow Airport, Oliver Hayes, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “MPs who backed this climate-wrecking new runway will be harshly judged by history. The evidence on the accelerating climate crisis, which is already hitting the world’s most vulnerable people, is overwhelming – and expanding Heathrow will only intensify the misery”.Read more
“The aviation industry has been promising cleaner planes forever and a day, with little progress or investment. With no government plan to mitigate Heathrow’s carbon emissions, or to address its already illegal levels of local air pollution, it’s astounding that this scheme has been given the go-ahead. The only credible vote was to reject the third runway.”
Yet in stark contrast the CBI say: “The race for global competitiveness is well underway and the UK must now be quick off the mark – work on the new runway should start as soon as possible. The prize is tens of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of growth for the British economy. As the UK forges a new path to trade, we must also make the best use of existing runways in regions across the country. A truly global Britain will need increased connections and routes from the whole of the UK, now and for the future.”
