One Planet Home retrofit wins at Sustainable Housing Awards

26.10.11

At last week’s Sustainable Housing awards held in London, BioRegional and partners’ One Planet House retrofit project won ‘sustainable smaller housing retrofit project of the year’. The project takes a unique approach to retrofitting social housing by looking at the hardware of the house across all aspects of sustainability as well as carrying out a behaviour change programme with the residents. The project is aiming for an 80 per cent reduction in energy use with only 50 per cent of the embodied energy of a standard retrofit.

Joanna Marshall Cook, Energy Project Manager at BioRegional said: “We are thrilled to have won this award. Getting retrofit right is really important for combating climate change, making our energy bills manageable and our homes more comfortable. In this project we are going a step further than most retrofits to also deal with the vital issue of behavior change - a measure that should be included in all retrofit initiatives”.

The renovation of the One Planet House in Sutton, south London, used ten One Planet Living principles to ensure a holistic approach to sustainability, they cover topics ranging from zero carbon and equity and local economy to land use and wildlife.  In this way tenants can be engaged beyond saving energy, for example by using food growing, walking, and wildlife gardening to talk about green issues in a way that is relevant to their lives.

The partners will carry out monitoring of this social housing property and compare it with two others ‐ one that has been upgraded to the Decent Homes standard and one where no renovation has taken place. All households are taking part in the behaviour change programme, in this way the different combinations of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ measures can be compared and those that achieve the best sustainability outcomes per pound spent can be identified.

The One Planet House partnership team is made up of sustainability experts BioRegional, Sutton Council, the borough’s social housing delivery organisation – Sutton Housing Partnership and eco‐retrofit experts Parity Projects and Lakehouse – the main contractor for the project.

The project is part of a national programme from the government’s Technology Strategy Board which is funding 87 low‐carbon social housing projects around the country. 

You can find out more about the project on the blog site http://retrofit.oneplanetsutton.org.