PIONEERING HOUSING DEVELOPMENT SHOWS CARBON NEGATIVE INNOVATION

An Abingdon company is building what it says is the most sustainable private residential development site in the country at the moment.

Greencore Construction, which is based at Culham Science Centre, is building 25 zero-carbon homes at Southmoor, between Oxford and Swindon.

According to Managing Director Ian Pritchett, they are even more energy-efficient than the well-known Passivhaus design standard.

Greencore Construction was set up in 2013 by Ian and his colleague Martin Pike to build high performance, low carbon buildings using natural materials (predominantly hemp, lime and timber). To date the company has built 50 houses, including the 25 it is building at Springfield Meadow, and has plans to build a total of 500 climate positive houses over the next five years.

The houses at Springfield Meadow (nine of which are classed as affordable homes), are carbon negative houses, taking out more carbon than they put in.

Ian said: “Most building materials have embodied carbon because the processes needed to produce them includes quarrying, firing and transporting, so they are responsible for CO2 emissions. But there are a class of building materials that come from plants, such as wood, hemp and woodfibre which reverse that.

“They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into cellulose which locks up carbon. When we decide what we build with, we try to balance those two things so we have at least as much carbon locked up in the bio base materials as are emitted from the high energy materials, and that’s how we can achieve zero.”

But as it builds, it learns, and Greencore now knows that it can go even better than carbon zero, to build carbon negative houses.

“Our experience so far has given us the concept which we call climate positive. We want to prove that building at volume can be done in a sustainable way.”

One of Greencore’s challenges is finding enough sites on which to build, because many residential development sites are owned by big housebuilders, so the company is continually on the lookout for local landowners to partner with.

But Ian is concerned about the government’s true commitment to sustainable development. “Politically we are being encouraged to build houses such as these, but the current legislation allows housebuilders to build to a pretty mediocre standard.”

Springfield Meadow isn’t the only zero carbon housing development in

Oxfordshire. Elmsbrook, at North Bicester, was the UK’s first eco-town.

A joint venture between property company Fabrica and developer Crest Nicholson, a total of 40 per cent of Elmsbrook will be devoted to green spaces, including allotments, sport areas, recreational facilities, cycle and walking paths.

The 400-home development is the first phase of Bicester’s eco-town that will eventually provide 6,000 homes and associated infrastructure.

According to the UK Green Building Council, it is the first and only UK development which meets original principles of PPS1 for eco towns and the largest true zero carbon development in the UK, incorporating regulated and unregulated energy.

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