BCA now mandates the use of PPVC on many types of residential Government Land Sale (GLS) projects and has established an acceptance framework backed up by the PPVC Manufacturer Accreditation Scheme.. BCA have promoted potential benefits of PPVC including improved productivity (up to 40% manpower and time savings), less dust and noise pollution, improved site safety and improved quality control in a factory environment..

They were overall much smaller than the dominant animals - the dinosaurs - and their size and adaptability is seen as a key feature for their survival and thriving.. Moving away from the natural world into the world designed by Homo sapiens, there is a very different approach to scale.Things are scaled up and down from the size of a human.

Houses and buildings are sized to wrap around humans and floor heights set to allow humans to walk upright.The first factories were simply extensions on houses and the machines and equipment were generally sized to fit into slightly large rooms.Of course, technology has pushed these boundaries to some degree and there are now large process plants like refineries or mega-factories..

The railway system of the world is scaled around the size of a horse and cart as that was the predominant transport technology when they came into existence.. Moving down in scale, we scale craft and industrial laboratory equipment so that humans can interact with it using their hands.. Evolution is an excellent process to improve and adapt size and function to meet the demands of survival.Its downside for humans is that in the context of the human lifespan it is very slow.

We do not have the luxury of a million years to size our factories.

However, neither should we now be constrained by the size of a human, a building or by the relatively recent economic dogma..It also reduces the number of people onsite, increases safety as a result of reduced work at height, lowers capital costs and improves construction speed.. Passivhaus and net zero carbon challenges.

There is an increasing amount of pressure growing in the construction industry to design net zero carbon buildings, both in terms of operational and embodied carbon.In this context, bodies such as the London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI), RIBA, GLA and UKGBC, have developed guidance documents on embodied carbon, which include specific targets and roadmaps to achieving net zero carbon prior to 2050.. Based on LETI Climate Emergency Design Guide, a typical medium size residential building embodied carbon, would be 33% of the total carbon, whilst the operational carbon would be around 67%.

However, for an ultra-low energy building, like Passivhaus, the breakdown would be 77% embodied and 23% operational and this balance is likely to become more enhanced with the decarbonisation of the grid.This means that embodied carbon is becoming a more important focus for the sustainable design of buildings..