What Colour is your Building? Measuring and reducing the energy and carbon footprint of buildings

Defining and reducing the carbon footprint of a new or refurbished building can be a daunting task. There are lots of tools to measure the environmental impact of buildings, but they all measure energy and CO2 in different ways, and they do not measure the whole carbon footprint.

What Colour is your Building? provides practical and pragmatic guidance on how to calculate and then compare the whole carbon footprint of buildings using one simple method looking at operating, embodied and transport energy. It will equip designers, building owners, occupiers, planners and policy makers with the tools and knowledge that they will need to make decisions early on about where the big impacts will be in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of the building, including:

• A new, simple approach to understanding the whole carbon impact of buildings
• Benchmarking data for operating energy performance
• A clear, transparent method of separating landlord energy performance from tenant energy performance
• Simple diagrams and numbers to put renewable energy into perspective.

1 Introduction Part 1 - What Colour? 2 Energy and Carbon in Buildings 3 How Much Energy Do Buildings Use? 4 Embodied Carbon 5 Transport Carbon 6 Whole Carbon Footprint Part 2 - Changing Colour 7 Ten Steps to Reducing Energy Consumption 8 Renewable Energy 10 Lower Carbon Materials 11 Green Travel 12 Making the Business Case 13 Conclusion