Construction Industry coming round to the idea of the Eco-Home

I found an article on the guardian website (here) which points out some very interesting facts about exactly how much of our carbon emissions are due to the buildings we live in.

Lots of people seem to think that the majority of the carbon is given out by cars and flying around the world, but according to the article around 50% of all carbon emissions for this country are directly related to heating and lighting our homes, and another 10% is used up producing the raw materials to build them.

This has prompted a selection of companies from the construction industry to get together and launch the UK Green Building Council. This group aim to improve the environmental impact of building homes over the next 10 years by introducing the idea of the "three zeros", this basically means they want to build sustainable homes that have zero emissions, zero dependency of external water supplies and zero waste.

The good thing about all this is the UKGBC are going to push all this through to their members without any government intervention. This will be the construction industry improving things off their own backs without having to have legislation force them to do it.

Building new sustainable homes isn't just going to benefit the environment, the people living in them will also see a financial benefit. Wouldn't it be great if your home was so efficient you didn't have to pay any utility bills at all. With things like this happening in a few years this could become a reality.

Until that happens though we can all do our bit to help reduce carbon emissions and the amount of energy we use by doing things like monitoring how much power we use, installing power saving light bulbs and recycling