How to reduce your home's carbon footprint
In this article we want to focus on the changes you can implement to decarbonise your house, whether you’re an architect, designer, project manager or the person starting to build your new home.
For those who don’t know about what’s happening in regards to carbon emissions and the importance it has on climate change we highly encourage you to read about COP26 and their Build Better Now Programme. This event exposed that the climate crisis we're going through is not being handled the right way and that we are all responsible to do something about it.
Huge changes are happening all around the world in different industries in regards to carbon emissions, but here we want to focus on the residential building industry in New Zealand where great improvements are occurring but there’s still lots to be done.
Here is what you can, and should start doing today to tackle this issue that involves us all. We believe it’s very important to lead by example and seek advice since there are many organisations doing amazing work sharing valuable information and educating about these topics (e.g. NZGBC & Kainga Ora)
We are not perfect and we understand some of these changes are not easy to implement in a short period but we have no choice. If you start taking action you’ll be helping way more than you think.
These are some of the initiatives we’ve been implementing at Modulo:
1) Waste management
The best waste is the one that is not created. In order to minimise the carbon footprint, a big improvement is to reduce the waste from the source. That way, less material will be produced and transported.
“Much of the construction and demolition waste can be reduced, reused or recovered. However, diverting waste from the landfill requires careful planning for each building project. Research shows that planning for waste reduction and reuse during project planning phases is the most successful way to ensure waste is minimised throughout the project.” (BRANZ).
Companies like Green Gorilla which is a construction and demolition waste processing facility diverts more than 70% of incoming construction and demolition waste from Auckland’s landfills including plasterboard; treated and untreated timber; nails and cardboard.
Better Building Southern Lakes is composed of architects, builders, tradies, developers, suppliers and mental health experts. They have set their vision for 2050 and priority actions including tackling building waste in partnership with Wanaka Wastebusters.
2) Energy efficiency (reducing operational carbon)
As we mentioned in a previous article, a typical home in Aotearoa emits five times as much carbon dioxide as it can afford to if the world is to stay inside 2C warming. To reduce the operational carbon from a building we need to build energy-efficient buildings, which basically means to use only as much energy as is needed without wasting any.
Energy-efficient homes have some basic elements in common: a tightly sealed thermal envelope; controlled ventilation; high-efficiency heating and cooling systems; and energy-efficient doors, windows, and appliances. Homestar is an independent rating tool for assessing the health, efficiency, and sustainability of your house developed by NZGBC.
3) Materials (reducing embodied carbon)
“Embodied carbon is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated to produce a built asset. This includes emissions caused by extraction, manufacture/processing, transportation and assembly of every product and element in the asset.”
The materials you choose for your project play a huge role and there are a lot of alternatives that will reduce your carbon footprint. As soon as you can, start choosing environmentally friendly, locally and sustainably sourced materials.
At Modulo we’re proud to use thermally modified timber for the cladding, windows, decking & screening (Abodo); solid beech flooring from Lindsay & Dixon finished with natural java oil from Natural House Company; and wool blend insulation from Terra Lana.
4) Get involved
We’re not experts in this field but we are in touch with many of them. Surrounding yourself with people that are doing the right thing and connecting with organisations such as NZGBC and the suppliers we mentioned is naturally going to change the way you view this issue and hopefully going to inspire you to start taking some initiatives.