Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans

Ep. 76 Why Embodied Carbon Matters and How to Reduce It Without Sacrificing Performance

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Steel and concrete make up 11% of global emissions, but we’re still designing like that doesn’t matter.

Natalie Black shares how her team at Enbee is dramatically cutting embodied carbon through design, detailing, and smarter material choices. This is a clear, honest look at what can be changed now and why the future depends on it.

Key topics include:
• The real carbon cost of steel and concrete
• Why timber matters more than ever
• How reuse, not just recycling, transforms carbon maths
• Strategies to ditch steel beams in domestic projects
• What it takes to work with engineers who “get it”

If you care about structure, sustainability, and impact, this is the deep dive you’ve been waiting for.

If you want to see our other insightful podcasts, click here:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOHI_yaqB2U8KWbsfJDPCoYEfOh-TTnip 

Find us on: 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0dDkxLWZ25nT0krYWaTiIT 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thrive-in-construction-with-darren-evans/id1726973152 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTrzqei7gttB8WB5wM6hUpw LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/thrive-in-construction-podcast/ Our Website: https://darren-evans.co.uk/

Links:
Natalie's Website: https://www.enbeearchitectureanddesign.com/
Natalies LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-black-9912633b/

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Speaker 1:

We built a certain way all the way up to the sort of, you know, 1920s. Then there was a shift. It became very, very artificial, incredibly processed, more efficient in some ways, so less skilled labour. But now we're having to sort of go back and look at some of the things we did in the past, because we did things quite well in a low carbon way, in a much more low carbon way than we're doing now. So it's this interesting shift of looking at the past, but also lots of innovation. So it's a mixture of the two. So it's sort of modernized the past in a modernized way, modern version of the past, I guess.

Speaker 2:

So how does that show up then? What does that look like? Can you give me an example how?

Speaker 1:

does that look like? What's that look like? So, for example, my projects use a lot of lime plasters for example, and lime plasters used.

Speaker 1:

You know, if you have a period property and you take the wallpaper off and you get to the plaster and if it hasn't been touched it will be an original lime plaster and it'd be about 20 to 25 millimeters thick. It'd be nice and thick, so we're, and if it's in good condition we can reuse it. If it's not, and it's had lots of repairs and there's cement plasters or gypsum plasters all mixed in, then we have to take it off and go back to putting a lime plaster back on as our substrate before we put insulation on there. So I think maybe the surprise is how much effect we can have in terms of reducing the carbon impact by using the materials that we're using, but also the carbon impact of the heating, because 28% of carbon emissions worldwide are to do with powering our buildings.

Speaker 1:

And being able to reduce that massively in a project. I guess there's an element of surprise and excitement over that. We've got a project where we reduced it by 90%. That's like a really massive, really huge.

Speaker 2:

Is it like a passive house style? And you've mentioned lime plaster. Is that connected to lime plaster as well?

Speaker 1:

So we've used lime plaster, because it's often the part of a system where you've got, for example, wood fibre or cork and they end up with a lime plaster as the final finish Can.

Speaker 2:

I pick this up, yeah, yeah. So this is lime plaster example here that you're holding up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, so basically we've got cork base, and it could be a wood fibre one as well. Which is there?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then it might go straight on an external wall, internally or externally, and then it then has a build-up of of like three layers of plaster. So you get a base layer which usually has a little groove in and it can be as thick as five millimeters thick, and then you then there's like a mesh that gets pushed into that and then there's another layer that smooths that out and that's another three or four millimeters and we try and get that smooth. And then if the client wants a really you know, like a really fine finish, like a chips and plaster finish, then there's a fine finish that goes on. That if it's internal or, if they don't mind it, a little bit more rustic, we can keep that first layer, that smooth layer. So that goes on top of the insulation.

Speaker 1:

And one of the nice things about it is it gives a one hour fire protection, with it being 10 mil thick. So that's quite nice. The other thing that's nice about using these materials people do ask me about fire. I've just touched on it and they're natural materials. They will burn, but they have a tendency to smolder and not leap into flame. And then the lime plaster on top is protecting them for an hour anyway, and we put in plenty of fire alarms.

Speaker 1:

It's good practice to put plenty of wired in fire alarms. It's something that people talk about since grenfell was.

Speaker 2:

You know, we're all much more aware of fire so just going back to these materials here and this thing, can I just grab it? Yeah sure, grabbing this thing. So um, so the the cork element, you're saying that that will go on the inner skin so you'll have your outer, outer block work a brick wall.

Speaker 1:

Then you'd have a cavity no no cavity no, no, let's, let's, let's think of it in terms of a period property okay so you've got a a solid brick wall, 225 mil thick or 330 mil thick, depending on whether it's two or three bricks the width of the wall. So it's solid brick. And then the existing wall would have a 20 mil of lime plaster internally if it hasn't been touched since it was built the so we, if it's, if we're insulating internally, we take off.

Speaker 1:

If we have to take off that internal lime plaster, we take it off. Then we put a. We put a sort of smoothing line plaster back on to get the wall smooth and level. Then we put an insulation board. It can be either. There's a number of materials that you can use, but we have a tendency to use either cork or wood fiber so far.

Speaker 2:

So this cork here would be used as insulation? Yes, here would be used as insulation, yes. And so what would be the insulation properties of of this cork when compared to something like a no?

Speaker 1:

a rock wall or in terms of lambda values, they're not that different, right? So so the the performance isn't, it's not that different and it's the same with wood fiber. So we tend to use the cork in more wet areas, so like a bathroom, for example. It's slightly more pricey than wood fiber and then we'll use wood fiber in sort of bedrooms and living spaces and things, but cork would be where there's a bit more moisture.

Speaker 1:

Moisture and in terms of it's good to think of it, in terms of optimum performance, it's one way that's good to think of it, and when you're reducing the the you value of your, we want to get the U-value down and a typical sort of people refer to them as nine inch brick wall, but I don't really work in inches, but 225 millimeter wall is. Typically. The U-value is about two and if you put 40 or 50 mil of wood fiber, of a wood fiber board or a cork board, you can get down to 0.47 or 0.5. So that's sort of 75% better. And then if you make it thicker, so you make it 80 mil or 100 mil, you're only actually ever taking it up by another 10% or so. So the optimum is around 40 or 50 mil, which doesn't take up too much space in the room and it costs less.

Speaker 2:

And so how does that compare then? So when I'm looking at these two insulating materials, just hold this other one up as well, just so that the viewers can see. So this is the a wood fiber, fiber, yeah wood fiber insulation. So how would this compare to a pir board? In terms, the lambda value is lower.

Speaker 1:

So a PIR board is supposedly more, will reduce the energy loss. More the heat loss, more the heat loss more. I say supposedly because there's all sorts of things with PIR that don't work so well with an existing building. So, for example, these materials are vapour open or breathable as some people like to say, but it's very confusing. Breathable sounds like it's allowing air through. It's not breathable sounds like it's allowing air through. It's not allowing air through, it's allowing moisture through, and moisture molecules are smaller than air molecules, which is helpful because we want the moisture molecules to pass through and we want the air molecules to stay in, so it's airtight.

Speaker 1:

So, um, the the soIR is not allowing moisture to pass through. So that causes a potential problem. Potential problem is that the bricks in the winter get wet from the outside and then they dry out in the summer and they're drying out in both directions. They're drying out into the property and outwards and you put something that's blocking that moisture passing through, you're stopping that drying out process happening so easily. And then the other thing is that the PARs say inside, we create a lot of moisture inside buildings. Loads like four pints per person per day. It's massive.

Speaker 2:

Especially in bedrooms, right where we spend a lot of time breathing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, it's very easy to think about it when, like, you're in a car and it rains, and suddenly the whole place and you stop the car and the whole thing steams up. Why does that happen? Why is that moist? Where's it all coming from so quickly? And it's yeah, lots of moisture is created through breathing and when it so, when it gets through and hits a cold surface, you can get interstitial condensation. So say, you've got a PIR board and you might have a gap somewhere, and then you've got the moisture potentially passing through and then it's reaching this cold surface and then PIR doesn't absorb any moisture, whereas the wood fibre will absorb some of that moisture and take it back into itself and then dry back out into the room. So it's managing the moisture much more effectively and reduces risks, because you can get unintended consequences If, like, the workmanship doesn't have to be so specifically perfect as it would be if you're using PIR, and often the workmanship isn't perfect for people.

Speaker 1:

You know, people haven't realized how important it is not to have gaps. Now, one of the things that's really nice about this is they've made this simple for the people who are putting it in, so it's got this nice tongue and groove to prevent there being gaps. The reason why gaps are really important is if you have a five millimeter gap in a book between boards, you can reduce the effectiveness of the insulation by 80%, which is massive, very significant.

Speaker 1:

And as far as I know, the PIR boards don't have the tongue and groove edge, and the other thing I've been told about them is that they shrink over time. So even if they are put really closely together and totally sealed, there's all sorts of things that can happen in that they could shrink, they might. You can get this interstitial condensation, which is a word I find difficult to say, stuck between the brickwork and the insulation. It's got nowhere to go. And the other thing which I'm not so keen on is if you I've got a, I use Ubiquus to. It's a software where I look at my buildups and I can see if there's a moisture issue. And I can see if there's a moisture issue, I can see what the I get, the U values that we reach, and I basically feed in all the different layers into that software.

Speaker 1:

And one thing that I was never really paying attention to was one side of it is about. It talks about the sort of temperature dampening of the material and that is to do with heat gain. And if you put, if you compare, for example, pir to wood fiber and you put it on the same buildup, you can see that PIR has like a, a six. It's like six hours, that it's sort of it's dampening the heat gain for about six hours, whereas the wood fiber is more like 12 to 14 and sometimes higher, and that is much more effective because it's a whole day and then you've got the night for cooling and you want to get that heat. You want to have it as as long as possible to stop the heat gain.

Speaker 2:

So in terms of heat gain, wood fiber is massively better so can you just for those people that are listening that aren't familiar with heat gain, can you just break that down, exactly what heat gain is?

Speaker 1:

that down. Exactly what heat gain is? Well, I, I think it's just like the way I like to think of it is, um, and it's something that's really familiar to lots of people is like you go into a church, right, you go into a church and it's nice and cool. That's because the walls are absorbing the heat and and they're they're sort of holding it there and that's that's what sort of it's sort of slowing down that heat gain. It's just going into the material and then at night it releases. And that's basically what's happening in this kind of, in these types of material. It's absorbing the heat and then releasing it later on. So it's just slowing down that sort of gain of, you know, of the temperature going up.

Speaker 2:

It's just slowing it down so the heat gain would be really really hot day outside. The sun is pressing against the material, heating up the material but it's holding on and that material is just holding that heat in, to say I'm gonna just keep it in.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and because the material keeps it in, then the people inside of the building don't feel the effect of the hot day outside. Yeah, so our bricks do that. And then at night time it just releases it predominantly outside as opposed to inside, so your inside isn't going to heat up overnight.

Speaker 1:

Well, I think with ventilation you can help it sort of blow it out into the cool night. You can help it sort of blow it out into the cool night. It's one thing we have to work very carefully when we're insulating buildings is trying to reduce the heat coming in. Heat gain is something that can be an unintended consequence of a highly insulated building. Because if you think about, say like if I'm sort of giving examples of constructions that are really easy to relate to so if you think about a tent like a tent is not, it's basically it gets hot very easily in the morning and then it's freezing it like because it's not holding any heat. It's, you know, it's just reacting very quickly to what's going on outside.

Speaker 1:

If you've got like a brick building, that brick is acting a bit like in the church, where you've got that sort of big, solid stone building. It's absorbing a lot of the heat and dealing with it and getting rid of it more slowly and and, um, you don't have the impact or you know, sort of it's that thing of dampening. It's just slowing that, that progression of maybe the heat waves. It's just dampening it down. So it's not so, it's not so intense. Um, yeah, that's. I always like to sort of think of it in terms of other other. You know familiar spaces to understand how it's working and that's super useful.

Speaker 2:

So, when it comes to using this type of insulation, I'm assuming now that cork will work the same as as the wood fiber yeah in terms of the way that it reacts to not just the heat gain but also the moisture. Yeah, and you made reference to the cork being used in a bathroom setting as opposed to. You know, that's the most effective place for it to be used.

Speaker 1:

That's where I tend to use it, yeah, but you can use them both externally as well it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but you can use them both externally as well. I was going to ask on the more kind of traditional cavity, uh, brick and block construction, does it have space there in a in a cavity?

Speaker 1:

they don't go.

Speaker 2:

They won't go in a cavity and why won't it go in a cavity? What's wrong with that?

Speaker 1:

um, they need ventilation, ventilating. So when we put them inside they're naturally ventilated by the space around them because there's nothing on top of them apart from the lime plaster. If they're put externally and say we've got, we want to, we've used it where we've built a timber structure but we wanted it to look like a brick building so we put a brick face on the front. We had to give a 50 mil ventilation zone that's ventilated. Or if we've got timber cladding in front of it, we have to ventilate it. So it basically has to ventilate. It has to have somewhere for the moisture to come out and get blown away so it doesn't sort of rot the material. And it's basically similar to like a suspended timber floor where you're always having to ventilate the underside of the house to make sure that it doesn't rot, because they are materials that will rot if they get too wet.

Speaker 2:

Consistently wet for a significant period of time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but they can get a bit wet. They can get wet and dry out, but generally we want to try and keep the shine. That's the main thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So do you think that this type of building method will ever become mainstream again, as it has done in the past?

Speaker 1:

So these materials weren't used, particularly we weren't. We weren't using these materials for insulation because we weren't insulating buildings, we were just building brick buildings with a lime internal plaster and then they were highly ventilated by all the gaps in the floorboards and all the sort of leaky windows and the air going up the chimney. So they were always very well ventilated a bit too well. You can feel the wind blowing through them. So now we're making them less ventilated, but then we've got mechanical ventilation coming in instead to make sure we have enough good quality air. Um, it's, it's, it's a modernized version. It's very niche at the moment. So if you compare, if you, if you um like to know what the market share is, it's tiny, it's one percent at the moment. That's how niche is.

Speaker 1:

I'm. I'm on a mission to take it up to two or three or four, that's. You know, I want to see it get. You know, I think I want to see much wider adoption now it that might happen. You know, if you think about, I like to think about it a bit like sourdough bread.

Speaker 1:

I love to have ways of thinking about things that people can relate to. So if you think about how bread became more and more and more artificial, became, more and more went towards the white sliced bread and it, you know, it got more and more refined, mass produced, but it became something that is very inexpensive but also not really very good for you. It's this there's not much in it that is nutritious in a slice of of of white bread. And then it. Then, you know, artisan breads started coming back and people realised, oh, this is, but you have to have the money for it. That's the problem. So this is more like sourdough bread. It's more expensive, you need the money for it, but it ultimately is much better for you. You can maybe use less of it. You don't have to have it at the really thick, you don't have to put in 100 mil, you can put the 40 or 50 mil and get that maximum impact. Um, but yeah, I think and I was thinking about it myself I grew up with a sort of quite bohemian parents and my mum made our own.

Speaker 1:

She made bread, so I never grew up on white sliced bread, so she made bread and I always ate brown bread basically, and so, and so for me it's difficult to. I mean, I'll eat a bit of white sliced bread toast. It's much nicer toasted. But you know I'm not. That's not what I'm drawn to and it's the same with this. It completely lies in my. It's the sort of same value system of being more natural, tapping into nature and being more healthy. It's better for the's, you know. It's not only better for embodied carbon, which is then better for the planet. It's more healthy to live in the spaces that are constructed like this. Um. So my hope is that, with more mass take up, it will become like you know how you can get the artisan breads in Sainsbury's and you can get them in Tesco's. You can get them everywhere. Now my hope is that, instead of it being this completely niche thing, that the bigger companies will start to adopt this and have their own range because they'll see the value in it. That's what I'm hoping for.

Speaker 2:

That would be a wonderful thing, wouldn't it? If the big volume house builders have got an offering that has kind of you know your sourdough offering, but within the housing industry, something that is not mass produced and low in terms of value and quality from the human perspective being in there. Because there is a significant difference being in a building which is constructed out of natural materials and I know that we've touched on moisture, we've also touched on heat as well and heat transfer, but there's also, from a sound and an acoustic point of view, is a difference from the air quality.

Speaker 1:

Massive difference.

Speaker 2:

There's a huge difference there as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so sound. We often use sheep's wool, so I think we've got a bit of sheep's wool. Yeah, so we often use sheep's wool in our partitions. Yeah, partly because often the partitions might be next to a space that has more moisture in, like a bathroom, for example, and wool can absorb moisture and perform just as well as well. It can be used in insulation. We use it. It's interchangeable, so I've got a whole load of flexible installations here. There's I've got I think both of these are hemp yeah, it looks like hemp to me it's when we put this in a recent project, when we got the hemp insulation.

Speaker 1:

It smells like a barn, smells like a sort of a field or like you've gone into a barn in the countryside and it was really lovely. We went into the house and it was like, oh, the whole house smelled like a barn. It was really nice. And then there's flexible wood fiber, one as well, um, so they're, they're all. They can all go into partitions. Or if you have a timber frame build up, they'll go between the studs, or you're insulating a floor. They can go between, um, between the joists or between rafters and a roof. So they can go in those places where you want to fit them between two timbers. And they're all interchangeable, really, and they're all good with acoustics. But you might want to use them, for, you know, different reasons might make you use one over another.

Speaker 2:

When you say it's interchangeable, are you saying that you can use it for um, for its insulating properties, and you can also use it for its acoustic?

Speaker 1:

yeah, exactly, and so you can use any of the flexible ones in water. Or it might be that you want to support, like the wool is a waste stream, or you might want to support a hemp insulation because it's grown in the UK and that's. It's interesting to support that industry. Or, for example, the wood fibre one I've used a lot because it's been part of a system timber. It's a whole system that I'm sort of tapping into and it will have the flexible between the timbers and then a solid wood fibre board on the outside. That's when we're constructing a new wall.

Speaker 2:

So they all, um, yeah, that we use them for different reasons so you mentioned pir and how pir will reduce or shrink over time that's what I've been told what is? What is the shrinkage when it comes to things like wool and hemp?

Speaker 1:

um, I've not heard that they shrink, and also, especially the ones that are um put into between timbers, they're sort of pushed in so that they're sort of pushing out to the edges a little bit. The main thing you want is that there's no gaps and that's a snug fit. A snug fit and that's some of the learning that needs to happen in the industry is that care with putting insulation in is not something that's been really thought about until more recently.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, about until more recently. Yeah, well, the I think, the difficulty with that is that the people working on the site are paid for the amount of bricks or blocks or stone that they lay. Yeah, and the insulation is a pain because they're not getting paid for fitting the insulation. So there is a rush job that's done for the insulation if it's in a cavity, probably not so much for insulation on a solid wall, this is, but definitely when it comes to cavity yeah insulation is is a pain yeah, I don't like using cavity wall construction.

Speaker 1:

I don't use it. Fact.

Speaker 2:

Why is?

Speaker 1:

that that's one that I think is very hard to retrofit. It's one that I think is old-fashioned construction now, although it's modern construction. In my mind, it's like we've done that and we need to move forward from that. There are, when we've done a brick wall, uh, when we've done sort of solid construction which isn't timber, we've used porotherm bricks, which have, which have, uh, basically, uh, they're both insulating and structural, and they've got holes all running all the way through from top to bottom, which are creating the insulating properties, and so it becomes this solid construct, a solid piece that goes in. I'm yeah, I'm not very keen on cavity wall construction. Um, they're not, it's not. They don't tend to be the ones that are promoted by the um, the natural material suppliers, who are the ones that I go to. They don't. That's, that's not usually a cavity wall system, uh, within their systems.

Speaker 2:

That they're talking about interesting and I think that that speaks very much to the concept that you made mention of before, which is historically it was a solid wall, solid wall build. Then there was a shift to predominantly it was a cavity. That cavity wasn't filled. Then it started to be filled and it sounds like from what you're saying now, is it there? The thinking is actually, when it comes to retrofit, it's really difficult, if not impossible, to do a retrofit on a on a cavity. But with solid walls there's a lot more flexibility and there's a lot more. There's a lot more options that you have no, you can't.

Speaker 1:

You can retrofit a cavity wall. It's just the inclination is to put insulation in that cavity. But that can have unintended consequences, because what happens when you fill the cavity is you can get water bridging across from one side to the other, where it wasn't before, and it just seems to have more issues. It just seems to have more issues. When we're looking at insulating cavity walls now, we're putting a system that's an internal wall insulation and leaving that cavity as a bit like the brick wall that I was talking about, where we had a timber frame and we had the ventilated 50mm cavity and then we had the bricks.

Speaker 2:

We just leave the cavity and the bricks on the outside and insulate internally and that's why I say that retrofitting with a cavity wall is and and you may not agree with me here, but we'll see it is not really retrofitting a cavity. What you're doing is you're treating a part of a cavity wall as an external wall or as a solid wall and you're doing something else because you don't know and you can't see inside that cavity and the risk is damp. That's effectively the risk yeah, so you get.

Speaker 1:

Uh, that is that, that is the risk, and the risk is water traveling across. So, um, you can't. You know you can and we've looked at doing that and you can refill with these little beads or you can refill it with, um, there's glass beads that you can put, so they can. There's either sort of porous darien type beads that can go in or I think they're called eps beads or, um, you can in. There's a glass, foamed glass bead that you can put into cavities, and I actually prefer that one because it manages moisture a bit better and it doesn't wick moisture.

Speaker 2:

But using the beads or using blown fiber, is that giving you the certainty that you need that you're not going to get that, that water transfer?

Speaker 1:

well, it's I. I feel more nervous about it because, um, it's, it's basically this you get the certainty that what I've been told is the people who are coming to install it. They will be the ones who are giving you the certainty, but they want to do that installation and make the money out of the installation. So I don't feel that comfortable with that and from talking to I talk to quite a lot of the suppliers that I go to have really really good technical support and their advice One of them has studied building physics and the other one has a huge amount of experience is to sort of not really, you know, nobody feels very comfortable with the cavity being filled in the way that dealing with a solid wall and you're insulating either inside or outside. We've seen that there are risks but they just feel lower.

Speaker 1:

You know it's just and you know the sort of moisture management and there's like a lot of people have put monitors to test how, like, for example, wood fiber performs at that junction between the brickwork and the wood fiber and that has tended to surpass expectations. Like the wood fiber dealt with moisture much better than was expected and that's nice. It's nice to have feedback on that Because if you also, if you put it into the calculator like the Ubiquitous calculator, it's showing lots of moisture at that junction. So it's a bit frightening. But when it's run through a woofy calc which is over 10 to 15 years, it's looking at the temperature going up and down and being winter and summer over that whole period. Then they look at how the moisture performs in that time and and it it passes.

Speaker 2:

so when was it that you decided that this was the road that you wanted to take within architecture, because I know you trained initially as an architect. But I'm just wondering here where you became really passionate about materials, really conscious about how those materials are used and the benefit not just for the building but for the people that are using those buildings.

Speaker 1:

It was in 2015. I had, so I stopped. I had a benefit of a pause, let's say. So. I stopped when I had kids and I didn't. I didn't uh practice, apart from doing a few sketch schemes for families. I didn't uh practice basically um between 2003 and 2013, so about 10 years, and then when I came back into it, I wasn't really sure which way I wanted to go. I'd, I'd did it, we'd lived in Jamaica for a bit and I did a project for somebody who was out there, I think in 2013 or 14, and I'd already always been interested in environmental values, and there it's all about cooling how do you create the the building so that you can cool it naturally. So I was looking at orientation, about wind routes through through the building, and about shading with trees and how you optimize for cooling, and so I always had interests along those lines.

Speaker 1:

But in 2015, my partner was away and I watched a documentary on climate change and it was the first time I'd really engaged with it. The kids were a bit older and I wasn't focusing on them quite so much and uh, um, yeah, I sort of finally able to look outwards. And I looked outwards and I was like, didn't like what I saw and and um was very surprised to learn from this, from the show, that it could be as quick as 30 years. I hadn't expected it to be so quick. I thought, oh, you know, I knew that there was something happening, but I didn't think it was a quick thing. I thought it was way off in the future and at that point I was like my kids are going to be in their 40s, you know, or one of them, the elder one would be in his 40s, the other one late 30s, and I was like it was just that I realised it was far more urgent. And then, a couple of weeks later, I went to FutureBuild and where I met you actually. Well, I didn't meet you, but I saw you talking to people and I'd already been going to FutureBuild.

Speaker 1:

It wasn't like you know, it wasn have an impact on our sort of carbon targets. I didn't really know about any of this stuff at the time, but they explained you know, you could massively reduce the energy consumption of a building through retrofitting. And we'd been, we'd lived in a super cold house not we'd moved from it by that point, but I'd had an experience of a house where it was hard to, it was hard to heat. We had a conservatory that was sort of the kitchen was right open onto this conservatory, which was built off a garden wall, and it just, you know, holding the heat into in that space was very hard. So I sort of tapped into the idea of one spending less money on keeping a building warm and to the effect that it could have overall in terms of of helping with the climate issue that we have. And, um, yeah, it was, there was a little competition for it.

Speaker 1:

You could, you know, you could put your name and and um on a on your business card, then post it in to see if you could win the course free, which of course I tried, but I didn't, um, but it was a thousand pounds and and I was like I didn't have the money, but I was like I have got to do this course.

Speaker 1:

And I remember um a few people saying, oh, you know why, you know you haven't got the money, don't do it. And I was like I don't care, I'm going to do it, I'm going to find a way of doing it. And I was so excited to start that the they had. They already had one of their courses that had started before future build that was over in Milton Keynes, and then the the course that was in London was going to start in a few months and I was like I'm so excited to start. I actually started the one in Milton Keynes and then, oops, sorry, and then carried on and finished it off in London once those ones had run out, because I didn't want to wait. I just wanted to start straight away and I was one of the most sort of excited people in the room asking loads of questions so that was a change for you 2015, no 2025.

Speaker 2:

The future for you is to try and take that one percent niche to a two percent yeah well, three, four, let's, let's keep doubling that's great yeah, I want to see it taken up on a much wider scale.

Speaker 1:

You know I'm developing more and more expertise in my practice to do it and we don't we don't just look at the materials that have that we've been using. I like to look at new materials that are coming out, for example, this one which was I don't know if you saw it when you were at future build.

Speaker 2:

It's called we text. No, I didn't see that. No, I, I was at future build, just solidly speaking to people.

Speaker 1:

That was all I was doing yeah, well, this one is a new one and in fact it won a prize at future build for the new, a new innovation product, and I'm looking at potentially using that in a project. And they also had this mycelium one mycene, interested to see how that could go into a project. I think it's you know, I think the people who are coming up with these ideas one, it's really exciting and it's you know, it's exciting to sort of try them out, but also they need support. They need support for their business to get going because they're doing a good thing. Like Weet-X is made out of waste stream, so it's made out of waste. It's a natural straw fiber and I think some of it is, you know, like the straw that comes off wheat, for example, which is why it might be called Weet-X. But they're using the waste material from from farms from a harvest from a harvest which is brilliant.

Speaker 1:

You know, I don't think you can get better than that, can you?

Speaker 2:

happens every year. Right, yeah, happens every year. It's probably just the way that my mind works like we to be. Just that's where I was going. That's where I was going we to bix, I could yeah, it's a bit like weetabix, but why not?

Speaker 1:

It will keep in people's minds, I think.

Speaker 2:

I think so that's good, good. Well, it's been great having you on the podcast and going through all of the material types and, as well, bringing the samples along so that the viewers can see it. For those people that are listening, I guess they'll just have to. There's only one way to see it, right, just to go onto youtube and and find out. But, but this is, this is absolutely great, and I'm just wondering here, just as a as a parting invitation, two questions. One is it, what is it that someone can do to support you? And the second is what problem is it that you are trying to solve for a potential customer?

Speaker 1:

To support me, hire me. It's a simple answer.

Speaker 2:

How would they do that?

Speaker 1:

So I have a website. So, nbarchitectureanddesigncom, we do projects from concept to completion. We like to guide our clients very carefully, more and more especially since the massive price rises from 2021 to 2023, 2024. We are very careful at looking at budgets from the outset so that we want to guide our clients to be able to actually build the project. So we start with that, we start with a questionnaire and looking at their budget and then if it matches what they want to do because sometimes the budget can be way off what they want to do then we're able to take it. The next step and we do a lot of work with them on their brief, really understanding their brief, and then eventually we take them through all the stages, the RIBA stages, from stage one through to stage five. Six is sort of more in use, where we come back and help out if we need to um. But we, yeah, with concept to completion and the.

Speaker 1:

The clients that um I get excited about and maybe and maybe they get excited about working with me are really interested in innovation and they're interested in trying new things and they, they, they get the whole environmental thing. They want to do something that's out of the ordinary. I want to do things that are out of the ordinary and if we match, that's brilliant. Yeah, and I'm also looking at there's a couple of materials we didn't talk about. I don't know if we have time to talk. I just would quite like to mention clay. So, clay, there's some two funky colours here, so we've got coloured clay. You can see them there they are. They're very nice with moisture as well, because they absorb it. They're made out of know just the earth, and uh, yeah, I, I just I like using them as a as a final finish, so I thought I'd mention them.

Speaker 1:

And the other thing is to mention is that reusing timber is really important. Um, because there's an amazing stat that I've got from Hattie Hartman's materials book, which is when a tree grows, it absorbs 1.64 kilograms of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere, and then you put it in the building and it gets used and it gets held in the building and that's great, so that carbon is staying in the building. At the end of use it's going. If it gets reused, you use 0.25 kilograms of carbon to reuse it, or carbon equivalent, and if it's burnt, the exact same amount of carbon is released back into the atmosphere. But if it goes into landfill, it multiplies up because it turns into methane and it becomes 41 kilograms of carbon. So it goes from 1.64 to 41. So reuse of timber is super important. So I just wanted to mention that.

Speaker 2:

The big issue with this is where timber gets ordered to site. More timber gets ordered than is needed and it just gets buried because the person thinks, well, it's just all natural stuff, right, it's gonna just go back to the earth, it's all, it's all fine. But not realizing that huge shift that happens in terms of a pollutant yeah, I had.

Speaker 1:

I didn't realize it was so bad. And also it's not only that is that when you're doing certainly working with an existing building, there's a lot of existing timber that comes out of a building and I want to see what we can. We've. We were we've been reusing floorboards and things like that for a while, but I want to look at that even more.

Speaker 2:

I want to go into more depths with that waste stream with the timber that it is, it has less of a negative impact on the environment if you burn it than if you bury it medieval building that's was in a town outside, you know, seaside town, and there's this beautiful medieval building with, uh, all the original sort of timber structure.

Speaker 1:

It can last a long time. You know, that's like 400 years old.

Speaker 2:

Let's reuse as long as we can my final question is what problem do you solve for potential customers?

Speaker 1:

what problem do I solve? So, um, I solve the problem of um that heat. So I deal with, um, reducing the energy consumption. I solve issues with damp I resolve, I help with help with issues like moisture control because of all the materials that we use. I solve the problem of, maybe, the internal layout or making sure they've got enough space so there might be an extension that's involved. I'm sort of thinking about what are three words that really describe us. We basically do responsible design that performs that's our main aim that it's beautiful, it's warm and it's healthy All those things. That's what we're trying to do.

Speaker 1:

We can reduce the embodied carbon from the structural side by, I think, as much as 40%, and that's through using a lot more timber, trying to get rid of steel. If you look at old buildings, a lot of you know like when you put an extension in a roof extension, suddenly there's all this steel that goes in and the old buildings they. There's all this steel that goes in and the old buildings they don't have any steel, so you can swap it out for timber in a lot of locations. It's just that we tend to want to have these much bigger openings, so much larger spans, which is more difficult to do in timber, so you can reduce the span, maybe not have some quite so big openings. Or sometimes we use flitch plates so you've got a steel, a bit a sort of steel plate, that's sandwiched between two bits of timber. So that's one way to reduce it and we're not doing we're trying not to do concrete slabs, we're trying not to do too much underpinning, so we try and reduce that, trying to do suspended timber floors, and the recent one that we did together has screw piles in and then it's a suspended timber floor on that and then we've got quite a large span in the extension but we have got a column, a timber column, that comes down, that helps manage that large span.

Speaker 1:

So accepting a timber column every now and then, that helps. We haven't got any steel structure in the upper part of the building, so we've done it all in timber, any steel structure in the upper part of the building, so we've done it all in timber. Yeah, it's really good to get a structural engineer who's on board with reducing the carbon in terms of the structure. That's really important because the carbon that I think concrete is about 8 percent of the world's carbon is through concrete. So it's massive and uh, steel is three to four percent, that's really huge.

Speaker 2:

Yeah good, it's been great having you on the podcast today. I appreciate you coming here and sharing your wisdom, your passion and uh, and and. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for watching to the end. I think that you'll like this. But before you do that, just make sure that you've commented and liked below and also that you subscribed.