Environmental Impact Of Empty Homes
Promoting our research work on the environmental comparisons between new build and refurbishment
This project seeks to gain a better understanding of the lifetime environmental costs of different ways of creating housing. Fundamentally it asks what is less damaging to the environment producing housing out of existing buildings or building new?
The Empty Homes Agency carried out some brief research into this question in 2005 comparing a single new house to a single refurbished home. The results were dramatic showing about 6 times as much CO2 produced from building the new one as refurbishing the old one. There has been a great deal of public and academic interest in this research, but its very limited nature has meant that firm conclusions cannot be drawn. Other questions such as lifetime CO2 costs have not been answered at all. For example, does the better insulation values achieved in new houses outweigh the energy costs incurred in their construction? We don’t know. What is needed is a wider study that more fully explores the potential environmental savings of creating housing supply from reusing existing buildings. This project aims to answer these questions.