Is zero-carbon goal within reach?

Anonymous

Living in a dream

Residents moving in to the BedZed development believed they would be at the forefront of an eco-friendly existence - then things started to go wrong. Terry Slavin investigates if its zero-carbon goal is within reach

Wednesday May 17, 2006
The Guardian

On a rainy day in Sutton, south London, the brightly-coloured wind cowels do not seem to rotate on the roofs of the BedZed housing development with quite the same vigour as they did in the early days. Indeed, four years after opening, BedZed's mission to show how people can live without exceeding their fair share of the world's resources has yet to be fulfilled. The biomass-fuelled system providing zero-carbon heat and electricity to 100 homes finally packed up early last year, forcing BedZed to draw its electricity entirely from the National Grid on what, residents were dismayed to discover, was not even a green tariff.
Meanwhile, the other linchpin of BedZed's ethos - its Living Machine, which uses reed beds to filter sewage water for use in toilets and gardens - has been out of operation for the past seven months because the Peabody Trust, the housing association that commissioned BedZed from BioRegional Development Group, an entrepreneurial, independent environmental organisation, could not afford to replace the operator.

Peter Wright, a development manager at the trust, says the project was over-ambitious, using untested technology and a complicated wastewater treatment system that were not economic to run. "I don't think BedZed was properly understood [before it was commissioned]," Wright says. "It was a demonstration project. We're a charity, formed to house people in need, rather than to subsidise the biomass industry."

But Bill Dunster, BedZed's architect, who has built a career propagating BedZed's design principles around the world, says solutions to the community's problems are at hand and the project that made his name is close to getting back on its zero-carbon track. (....)

Contributor: Javiera M.
Continue reading: The Guardian, http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1775977,00.html

Anonymous

The products and systems weren't appropriately tested - it seems to me that this was the problem and not the zero-carbon approach.
How much effort, natural resources and money is spent in publicising unsustainable products and systems? If a fraction of that went to the research of an alternative indutry and methods, perhaps we could achive the zero-carbon target.