Green builders hit back at "greenwash" accusations

The Green Building Council has today rejected accusations that the UK construction sector is failing to take environmental sustainability seriously enough and is engaged in widespread " greenwashing".

The accusations were levelled by the government's watchdog on town planning and design, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), which last week claimed that the vast majority of flagship building projects are failing to prioritise environmental sustainability.

A spokeswoman for CABE said the organisation undertook design reviews of about 350 large construction projects in the past year and found that only a "handful" boasted "commendable" performance in terms of environmental sustainability. "We are not seeing enough attention given to sustainability right across the board," she warned.

The reviews found that many new buildings were located with little thought given to public transport access and that few attempts were made to optimise the efficiency of cooling and heating systems.

They also concluded that where buildings do deploy renewable energy microtechnologies they are often installed as little more than a means of " greenwash", highlighting the supposed green credentials of a site but having less impact on energy use than if the building had been better designed or had used a community-scale renewable energy system.

However, John Alker of the Green Building Council downplayed the suggestion that the sector was engaged in "greenwashing" activities and insisted that overall the industry was making good progress towards embedding sustainability into its processes.

"It is true that there is not a large number of exemplar green projects on the ground, but we are definitely heading in the right direction," he said. " CABE has made some valid criticism of projects that take a box-ticking approach to installing technologies such as micro wind turbines and do not embrace more holistic sustainability principles, but if you look at the number of sites gaining the highest level of BREEAM certification there are more and more buildings where you can see that sustainability principles are making headway."

He added that by the end of the year legislation was likely to be introduced that would require all new-build homes to be zero carbon by 2016 and all buildings to be zero carbon by 2019, effectively forcing building firms to embrace sustainable design.