FRONT DESK / ANALYSIS
E NV IRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Required: a renaissance for retrofitting By Herpreet Kaur Grewal
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etrofitting rather than demolishing buildings and constructing new ones in their place is almost always more cost-effective and less carbonintensive from a sustainability perspective. And now, a growing realisation of the retrofit’s lighter impact on the environment is dawning with a wider audience of built environment stakeholders. At the end of 2021, Marks & Spencer came under criticism for its plans to demolish its 90-year-old flagship store on Oxford Street in London. The key concern was the amount of CO2 would be involved – with thoughts turning back to retrofitting the existing building. Similarly, a decision to take down the Assembly Rooms in Derby was criticised when it was shown that demolishing and building anew would lead to 11,413.2 tonnes of CO2e
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when refurbishing it would involve a comparitively low 4,100 tonnes of CO2e. Philip Oldfield, director of the University of New South Wales’ architecture programme, calculated that the difference between the two would be equivalent to “1,590 passenger cars driven for one year”. Research in 2021 by heritage body Historic England also found that “carefully retrofitting” historic buildings “can lead to substantial carbon savings in the long term” With World Building Council figures showing that buildings producing almost 40 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, there is a sense that defaulting to retrofit could be a key trend in 2022.
Prioritise planning One reason is that there is increasing pressure for the governments of the UK to weigh more carefully
which planning applications to grant or reject based on the green credentials of the buildings proposed. Countryside campaign group CPRE recently backed this move. Andrew Wood, its spatial planning lead, said that government planning reforms in England must factor in that “cutting carbon should be a basic criterion for major new projects to be considered”. The body also argued for greater powers for local authorities to make these decisions in local applications. For instance, plans for the ‘Tulip’ – a 305m tower proposed for the City of London – were rejected on appeal by the government for primarily environmental reasons. Secretary of State Michael Gove said that “the extensive measures that would be taken to minimise carbon emissions during construction would not outweigh the highly unsustainable concept of using vast
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