Timber Development UK (TDUK) is partnering with New Model Institute of Technology and Engineering (NMITE), Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) and the Passivhaus Trust, to challenge built environment students, as well as recent graduates, to form multidisciplinary teams to create a ‘net-zero community centre’ based on timber and timber-hybrid systems.
Students from all built environment courses at UK universities, from first to final year, along with 2021 graduates are invited to enter the competition which launched on the 30 November at the Building Centre, London and online. The 2022 challenge – is to design an exemplary community building that produces more energy than it consumes, at Southside in Hereford. Teams must produce designs that sites the community centre within the local context and landscape integrating the clients’ and communities’ interests.
The detailed designs must be ‘net zero’, creatively employing sustainable building materials and construction methods, and be energy and resource efficient, focusing on the health and well-being of people, the community, and our planet.
Tabitha Binding, TDUK, University Engagement Programme Manager, said: “Built environment professionals must prepare for a net zero future, and this must start in the classroom if we are to reach our climate goals. Our curriculum must be strengthened to meet the climate challenge by raising climate literacy. For our future architects, engineers, cost consultants, and landscape architects, this means improving their knowledge and capability of working with low-carbon materials such as timber – and being able to use it wisely and well.”
Professor Robert Hairstans, CATT Director, NMITE, added: “The objective is to inspire a generation of built environment professional to think differently about construction delivery towards more sustainable forms using timber rather than the traditional carbon intensive materials of steel and concrete. This challenge will exemplify this approach and create value return for the stakeholder partners of the Southside Hereford Project.”
TDUK is also bringing clarity to how to account for embodied carbon in timber construction with a newly released technical paper. ‘Assessing the carbonrelated impacts and benefits of timber in construction products and buildings’ explains how to account for carbon in timber buildings and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) by rigorously applying the latest British / European Standards. This will prove useful for building designers, clients, and contractors when assessing the embodied carbon associated with buildings and other structures, as well as product manufacturers and suppliers in demonstrating the carbon impact of their products.
Charlie Law, Sustainability Director at TDUK said: “Across the built environment professions there is rising wave of awareness that if we are to build to net-zero carbon we need to tackle how we account for embodied carbon. This paper seeks to help unify how we account for embodied carbon within timber buildings and structures so we can better understand, measure, and address these emissions in order to reduce their environmental impact.”
Source: www.ttf.co.uk
