Each year, the UK produces an estimated 335 million tonnes of waste, according to number-crunchers at DEFRA, the UK government department responsible for policy and regulations on the environment. Around half of that ends up in a hole in the ground, commonly known as landfill. Waste capacity in some regions of the UK is down to less than five years at current rates of consumption.

Waste policy is waste of time

The House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee recently criticised DEFRA’s waste strategy for focusing disproportionally on domestic waste — the waste that we leave by the roadside for collection. It accounts for less than 10 per cent of overall waste in the UK. Non-household waste makes up the majority of landfill but with no directive from the European Union, the UK Government has set almost no targets.

Government policy in this area is quite literally rubbish.

There is one exception, namely demolition and construction, which currently generates more than three times the amount of waste of domestic households (32 per cent). The Government wants this halved by 2012.

It’s this area of waste that has been under scrutiny on our project restoring a 300-year-old farmhouse in Northumberland around eco-principals. There is inevitably lots of waste when an old building is stripped back to its core.

The farmhouse is a round-trip of more than 50 miles from the nearest waste disposal and recycling centre. The cost of transport combined with waste charges provides a big incentive to find alternative means of recycling or reuse.

Reuse

Where possible, we are reusing waste materials from the build. Rubble and stone is being incorporated as the foundation of new paths or set aside for use in the garden.

Wood from kitchen benches will be manufactured into shutters or raised flowerbeds. Electrical and plumbing fittings be reused at least until we know that we can afford to replace them with modern eco-versions or original fittings in keeping with the house.

More than three tonnes of stone chips have been removed from the old farmyard to make way for a kitchen garden. The stone is from the local Biddlestone quarry and is a common feature of local paths and driveways so the spoils have been literally shared around the neighbourhood.

Recycle

Where reuse directly on site isn’t possible, materials are being sorted and recycled.

Any wood that can’t be reused on the project has been offered to a local carpenter. Rejected timber will be chopped up for use as fuel on the stoves in the winter. Likewise, old cables, pipe work and radiators are being set aside for metal recycling.

Some items are hard to recycle despite their excellent condition. You struggle to give away a second-hand toilet it seems — even on a recycling site such as Freecycle.

Herein lies the issue: it takes considerable effort to coordinate and manage waste disposal and reprocessing on a building or renovation site. It’s much easier and ultimately less expensive, given labour costs, to use landfill.

But that’s because waste disposal costs don’t reflect the true price of disposal. How can it when it will take several decades for landfill waste to degrade? Waste storage would be a more accurate description of the issue.

Editor’s note: Two years ago, Stephen Waddington moved with his family from Ealing, London, to rural Northumberland. He joins the Greenbang team to write an occasional feature about his family’s attempts to renovate a 300-year farmhouse and live by eco principals.

Stephen is the managing director of Speed, a London-based multi-sector PR firm. He splits his time between London and his home in Northumberland. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadds.

Editor’s note: Two years ago, Stephen Waddington moved with his family from Ealing, London, to rural Northumberland. He joins the Greenbang team to write an occasional feature about his family’s attempts to renovate a 300-year farmhouse and live by eco principals.

Stephen is the managing director of Speed, a London-based multi-sector PR firm. He splits his time between London and his home in Northumberland. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadds.

Greenbang readers are a vocal bunch. I’ve had several suggestions for alternatives to double glazing following my last article chastising English Heritage for taking a hard-line approach to double glazing in historic listed buildings.

Shutters or clingfilm as alternatives to double glazing
English Heritage suggests boarding the windows with shutters as an alternative to double glazing. To be fair they’ve run the numbers in a document titled “Building Regulations and Historic Buildings.” Only high-performance double glazing performs better than more traditional approaches.

According the English Heritage, well-insulated single-glazed windows with night shutters perform almost as well (at night) as secondary-glazing and double-glazing with a 12-millimetre gap. The farmhouse walls are a metre thick at their thinnest point so there is plenty of room for internal shutters. They remain subject to investigation.

A second suggestion is less impressive. Plastic film and double-side tape are recommended as a low-cost seasonal alternative to double glazing. A sheet of heat shrink plastic is literally taped to the window frame and blow dried over the window. I have no idea whether clingfilm as a means of window insulation would be offensive to English Heritage or our local planners but I have no intention of finding out.

Balancing heritage and environmental design continues to be the biggest headache of the redevelopment of our 300-year Northumberland farmhouse.

Balancing historic detail vs insulation
We’re opening up the ceiling in a single-storey section of the farmhouse to take advantage of the double-height roof apex. The series of rooms off the kitchen was previously a barn and grain store; it was connected to the main house and modernised in the 1980s.

The planners want the wooden purlins in the roof structure to remain clearly protruding from the ceiling once the roof space is opened out. Aesthetically and historically it makes sense but every millimetre of space we lose to historic detail is a millimetre less insulation.

Any hope of using an environmental form of insulation such as hemp or sheep’s wool is gone. They simply would not provide an adequate insulation density. Instead we’ve got to compromise and look to modern materials.

Range restoration
One area of the building where there is no debate about the restoration of historical detail is the cast-iron range in the kitchen. Not because it has historical significance in its own right but because the wooden surround and concrete hearth that have been added are plain vandalism.

The range dates from the 1850s and was almost certainly cast in one of the now-defunct shipyards on the River Tyne in Newcastle. It’s a beast of a piece of kit that is almost the size of a small car. It gobbles firewood and takes the best part of half-a-day to get up to a cooking temperature.

Like the Redfryne stove that will most likely remain part of the kitchen post-development, it provides far more than warmth for cooking and heating. It’s a real-life working connection with the past that outstrips any debate over historic detail. And it’s the heart of the house both physically and emotionally.

Editor’s note: Two years ago, Stephen Waddington moved with his family from Ealing, London, to rural Northumberland. He joins the Greenbang team to write an occasional feature about his family’s attempts to renovate a 300-year farmhouse and live by eco principals.

Stephen is the managing director of Speed, a London-based multi-sector PR firm. He splits his time between London and his home in Northumberland. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadds.

Environmental planning should be incredibly straightforward. Nature has stated its case and clearly laid out the rules and it’s now a case of falling into line.

All too often, however, local agendas override macro environmental concerns. In the UK, the history of a building is placed ahead of its environmental impact.

Chasing the eco-dream

Two years ago my family bought a 300-year-old listed farmhouse in Northumberland. It sits east-to-west, facing south on top of a hill, with a formal garden at the front framed by a wall and two dove cotes. Our vision was to take it off grid insofar as possible with the target of a zero-carbon footprint.

We’ve spent 18 months and thousands of pounds chasing archaeological surveys, bat surveys, historic building reports and architectural plans to create a planning blueprint.

The good news is that we’ve received consent to undertake almost all the work we want to in order to sympathetically restore the house yet modernise its services.

The bad news? Environmental concerns are literally out of the window. Solar water heating and replacing the windows with sympathetically aesthetic double glazed units are an absolute no-go. And the viability of a biomass boiler is in question.

Eco-fiddling

I’ve done the sums. Unplugging the TV at night or using eco-light bulbs doesn’t make a blind bit difference when more than 30 per cent of the energy used to heat a house is disappearing though the windows.

Both solar panels and double glazing are dismissed on grounds of authenticity. Solar I can understand, but the argument that sympathetic double glazing would change the character of the building is beyond me, especially with the quality of craftsmanship available in the UK. But, according to preservationists historical detail must be the top priority where a historic building is concerned.

A study by management consultants McKinsey more than 18 months ago found that emissions from buildings generate two-thirds of London’s CO2 and that the greatest reduction could be achieved through improved insulation. Domestic insulation makes both economic and environmental sense.

Double glazed windows would require the glazing bars between the window panes to be 5 millimetres thicker but that’s 5 millimetres too thick as far as English Heritage is concerned. And without decent insulation you need to generate a lot of heat to keep the building warm. Ground source heating is unworkable without decent insulation.

Biomass as a heating source is in question as it would require a new flue and that would have a detrimental impact on the appearance of the house — unless we can integrate it into an existing chimney. That aside, I have concerns about the viability of woodchip as a domestic heat source; biomass boilers are industrial rather than domestic products, information about the eco-credentials of the manufacturing process of the fuel is hard to come by and its undersupply in the UK means that it appears to track the oil price.

Flaws in carbon offset

With the help of some friends from the Woodland Trust, we’ve planted an orchard and native trees in a bid to grow our own fruit and offset carbon but that no longer makes me feel a lot better. Besides, our efforts are dwarfed by the Forestry Commission which maintains a 375-acre wood on our doorstep. It brings home the brutal truth that carbon offsetting so often is a mask for the much bigger issue of poor energy use rather than a solution in itself.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. We bought the house knowing that it was historically important and that, combined with its location, was fundamentally the root of its appeal. But I am grumpy. I’ve had to compromise my principals — and burn lots of oil.