Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 28/01/2013
Event: Julian Allwood on the "economic trap" of cheap, efficiently-produced materials
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
Evan Davis: We give quite a lot of attention to environmental issues, in the UK - recycling newspapers or installing insulation, we've been talking about that already, this morning. But there's one huge issue that gets rather overlooked - it's how far we build and design things to economise on the materials that go into them. Houses, cars, manufactured goods... The Royal Society is publishing a report today on what they call "material efficiency" - cutting down on the stuff that goes into things. Dr. Julian Allwood is one of the authors, from Cambridge University, good morning to you.
Julian Allwood: Good morning.
Evan Davis: Give us an example of the sort of potential to economise. I mean, you build a house, it's obviously got to have walls and a roof. How - if you build it really, really efficiently, how much more - how much less material could you put into it than we do normally?
Julian Allwood: Well, if we look at commercial buildings - so, offices or shops in the UK - then at the moment we're building buildings that could last for 100 to 200 years, but actually we're replacing them after about 40. And we're building them with round about double the amount of material required by our own safety standards, which are already pretty conservative.
Evan Davis: Right. And, presumably, if we did make cars - build cars and buildings more efficiently - this would make a much bigger difference to all sorts of environmental questions than plastic bags or newspaper recycling.
Julian Allwood: Yes, indeed. About a third of the world's energy is used in industry, and half of that is to make just five materials - steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium. So a sixth of all the world's energy is used to make those five materials. And if we made a big difference in using less, we would have a very dramatic effect on our energy use and eventually our emissions.
Evan Davis: Well, you mention the example of a building - so what could you do? What would you do - build thinner walls? I mean, just how do you use less material?
Julian Allwood: We're caught in an economic trap, that labour's expensive and materials are made so efficiently that they're very cheap. So, unfortunately it's completely rational at the moment to use less material - I'm sorry, to use more material if we can use less labour. So even in designing buildings, it's cheaper to approximate and use more material than to pay for the design time to make the building exactly conform to our Eurocode standards.
Evan Davis: Oh, I see. So, effectively - you might expect this to happen anyway, but you might expect, as the world starts trying to use more material and more countries become rich, the price of materials needs to go up, relative to labour, and then people doing the construction will see it really is worth employing the engineer to work out - we don't just order 10% too much and throw 10% of it away, we'll really work this out to the last decimal point.
Julian Allwood: Potentially, and that would be great. I think the prices would have to rise a very long way for that, and there are other drivers as well. When we go to car showrooms - I'm not in the kind of career where I go to a car showroom, but I gather people do - and when they go there, although they go with green motoring in mind, what they actually are driven by is the ambition to get the biggest, fastest accelerating car they can get. So, unfortunately, although we have the technology to make very energy-efficient cars - the world record is over 10,000 miles per gallon - what we're actually doing at the moment is making bigger, heavier cars that accelerate more rapidly.
Evan Davis: Food for thought. Dr. Julian Allwood, thanks very much indeed.