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The London Olympics will be the 'greenest games ever'
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Dr Peter Bonfield
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Dr Peter Bonfield was running a little late for his interview with Greenbuild as he was busy talking to the Chinese ambassador who was visiting BRE’s Innovation Park. The reason for the visit was simple, explains Bonfield: “This is world-class Britain. The Chinese vice-premier visited in January and we’ve had visits from South Korea and Russia and they all want to learn from Britain.” The world-class achievements he is talking about involves the 500 companies who have helped to create the Innovation Park, a collection of houses built using the latest construction methods and technologies, to find out what works – and what doesn’t – and aid our understanding of producing zero-carbon dwellings.
And Bonfield truly believes the UK is world-leading when it comes to sustainable building, which is a somewhat refreshing opinion compared to many who claim the UK is lagging behind other nations. “I do sound very positive but actually I’m very realistic about things,” he says. “I have evidence to support the things I tell you. Our government has been very good – not everywhere, but mostly – on the built environment and doing the right green thing.” He gives the example of the Code for Sustainable Homes, which has mapped out the various performance targets new homes need to meet by specific dates, and the BRE worked with government on how the homes will be assessed. “The Code for Sustainable Homes policy is great policy making, in my view. Because what it does is to say that by 2016 all houses will be zero net carbon. What’s really significant is that the solution is not prescribed. It’s a performance target and we had eight years to get there but the government doesn’t tell us how to do it.” This type of deadline, says Bonfield, creates certainty within the market and allows companies to innovate.
Greenest games
Another example of the UK’s innovation in green building is, of course, the Olympic Park, and Bonfield has played a crucial role in achieving the sustainability goals of the project. He’s been seconded to the Olympic Delivery Authority since early 2006 to help produce a sustainability policy – and was later asked also to lead on construction products. “When Sebastian Coe pitched the games to the International Olympic Committee, the three key themes were the greenest games ever, creating a legacy and regenerating a deprived area of London. These themes have been embedded in the whole culture and philosophy of delivering the project,” says Bonfield. And, he adds, it really will be the greenest games ever. “It is one of the first games where we have really embedded sustainability into the planning, rather than it being an add-on or something you think as separate from the delivery programme. It’s been integrated from the design philosophy of the main stadium through to how we’ve minimised waste.”
The lessons learned from the Olympic Park can be put to use in other developments too. “The principals we’ve applied are very, very replicable. Some of the learning has already been taken away and used in other projects,” he explains. “We have 20 main contractors who have learnt things on this project and applied them elsewhere. We have whole sectors, such as the timber industry, who have materially upped their game in sustainability as a consequence of the project and are carrying this to their other work.”
Bonfield believes this is a really important breakthrough. “It’s often thought that the construction industry is relatively weak at taking the learning from one project and applying it to the next one, so one of the opportunities we have with this project is to take the learning, write it up and engage with both the public and private sectors and let them learn from our mistakes and our successes.”
The different venues at the Olympic Park are either finished or nearing completion and should be handed over by July. One of the most eye-catching venues is the velodrome and, as a keen cyclist, Bonfield must be dying to give the track a test drive. “I could have had a go but it would have been totally inappropriate because the first people that rode it were London school kids. It was fantastic because the reason we’re building the venues is not just for the Olympics, it’s for people in London and schoolkids to be motivated and become future world champions. And the second people that rode it were our Olympic athletes. So I’ll have to be patient but I would love to ride it. I might have to wait until 2013 but I can tell it’s going to be beautiful.”
Happy birthday
In the meantime, Bonfield will be concentrating on this year’s celebrations – BREEAM is 21 and the BRE itself is 90 years old and it’s an eventful time for the organisation. “We’ve been around 90 years as a research-based organisation, which sounds rather traditional. But what’s really interesting is that I think we’re just arriving. Ninety years of learning things and developing expertise and it feels to me that it has been for now. Because of challenges such as climate change, our ageing demographic, mass globalisation, mass urbanisation, social reform, doing more for less and working with new technologies, more than ever we’ve got to make change happen and we have less money to do it with than before. We don’t have space to get things wrong. And one of the best ways of getting things right is having a good research base and a good evidence base, so we’re actually becoming really relevant and required and needed. I quite like the fact we are looking back over 90 years but perhaps celebrating the fact that we’re more relevant today – and for the next 10 years – than we’ve been for the whole of our history. That’s exciting, especially as chief executive.”
And sustainability is not a new thing for the BRE, as Bonfield points out. “ We were looking at energy efficiency 80 years ago but nobody else was.” He’s also eager to point out that sustainability is not just about energy efficiency or cutting carbon, it’s also about social and economic sustainability. “I’m passionate about doing the right things by the planet but I absolutely don’t want to do it through philanthropy or doing the right thing. You’ve got to do it because you save costs, make more money and provide economic growth. And thinking about the social sustainability issues, we can’t have more people in fuel poverty. We’ve got to have communities where people feel a sense of place. We’ve got to do things about reducing obesity. And the common thread amongst all those factors is the built environment. It may be around 10% of our GDP but it impacts on absolutely everything we do, the communities we live in, how we feel about things, how we learn, where we work. So, our opportunity now is to connect all these things together within the built environment and capitalise on the good policy setting we’ve got and the state-of-the-art industry.”
To read about the BRE’s 90-year history, visit www.bre.co.uk/ninety.
Picture of the Olympic Park courtesy of London 2012.
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2011 issue of Greenbuild magazine. For a free subscription click here .
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