Blog

  • Embodied emissions within buildings

    The Green Building Council did commission a report to explore the embodied carbon of New Zealand’s buildings and potential reduction potentials. Obviously, buildings may vary greatly in their embodied carbon but this is some average assumptions.

  • Mini starts retrofitting classic Mini models

    A little car with lots of potential and a cult community – for good reasons. They are efficient and keep going, easy care and maintenance. And now they prove to be future proof as well as they can simply be converted to electric

  • SALADA

    I have been a scout leader for more than a decade now and one of the things we learnt and what we try and teach the kids is SALADA. This is an acronym for “Stop Assess Listen Allocate Do Assess again”. It is also symbolised…

  • COP26 – Just another talk? Up to you!

    It’s that time of the year again – ground hog day – another global leader meeting to tackle climate change. Or to talk about tackling climate change. Do whatever you can – at home or work, in your job, in your projects. It’s up to…

  • Horrible Hybrids – A reminder

    Michael Braungart and William McDonough called them “horrible hybrids” in their 2002 book “Crade to Cradle”. Things that are fused together from different materials that cannot be separated and thus not recycled.

  • Ponderings around electricity supply and electric cars

    I have been drivings hybrid cars for about a decade now and really like them. They are particularly well suited for mid to long range drives. They are not great for short trips, a plugin Hybrid would be way better for that but has been…

  • What to eat those days?

    Being married to a vegetarian and not cooking extra at home, the family tend to eat vegetarian – with lots of soy products. So this post is more of a collection of thoughts around soy products. And yet again there’s confusing information out there. The…

  • Kiwibuilds 100,000 homes progress

    The average build numbers according to my article published in 2018 would have been ~30,000 homes by now. The actual stats are somewhat lower than that: 934 – yes: 934. Even if we would say that starting up is hard and the initial output would…

  • Auckland and water – yet again

    I have been wondering about the very low water rates for years. Maybe time to actually pay the price for the “precious” resource because so far it has been a very cheap resource. Water saving technologies have been around for long and it also will…