IES Blog

Having recently become a father of a baby girl, I have now started living a life as a father. No doubt it is a tough job and it sure is challenging, but on the other hand it is joyful. You might think why am I writing about fatherhood in this blog? Because how you raise or take care of a baby is closely related to our environment.

I read an article last month about being a “green family”. The couple are raising their kid in a diaper free environment. Just a bit of fact, on average a baby will go through about 6,000 disposable diapers by the time he/she turns two years old, that means millions of diapers end up in the landfills every day, taking about 200-500 years to decompose. At first I thought this sounds a bit exaggerated, but now I do believe 6,000 diapers in two years maybe achievable.

So one solution for this is of course change to cloth nappy, and at best nappy-free. This sounds easy, but it does require quite a bit of effort. I do admire the couple’s effort getting their baby to use the cloth nappy all the while and turn nappy free after six months. We have tried using just the cloth when our baby was about 1 -2 months, but soon realised it is too much trouble and have then switched to disposable. After reading this, I think I should try using the cloth nappy again since she is now older and the frequency for toileting should not be as high as before. I was always hoping to see something like bio-degradable diapers (since we can have bio-degradable plastic bags, why not for diapers) in the market, but so far no luck, I think this will be a good product for the market.

I may not be doing so well on the diapers side, but I do try to help the environment in other area, i.e. after bathing our baby, will keep the water for flushing the toilet. There are also a lot of things parents can do or be aware of, for example, not to buy too many baby clothes as you will soon realise they can’t fit in them after wearing a few months as they just grow too quickly. Don’t buy too many toys, as they probably prefer parents playing with them instead (at least that what I have noticed). 

Let’s not forget our children’s’ future environment while happily raising them.

To read the “Green Family” article, please click here.

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Tags:Environment, free, nappies

Recently, there is different kind of activities in Malaysia where people start promoting a technology called Effective Micro-organism (EM) technology. This is mainly used to treat greywater, minimise odour in septic tanks, remove sludge from drains and improve recycle water.

Last year, there is an environmental biomediation project & awareness campaign in Penang named “One million apologies to mother earth”. The idea was to organise an event of making one million EM mud ball and throwing them into various heavily polluted rivers in Penang, Malaysia in a single day.

The concept of EM Technology was developed by Japanese horticulturist Dr. Teruo Higa, from the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan. Dr. Higa claims that three groups of micro-organisms exist: ‘positive micro-organisms’ (regeneration), ‘negative micro-organisms’ (decomposition, degeneration) and ‘opportunist micro-organisms’. In every medium (soil, water, air, the human intestine), the ratio of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ microorganisms is critical, since the opportunist microorganisms follow the trend to regeneration or degeneration. Therefore, Dr. Higa believes that it is possible to positively influence the given media by supplementing with positive microorganisms.

Japan had used EM Technology to clean up more than one hundred heavily polluted rivers over the last 20 years. EM is a proven technology in environmental remediation and all the rivers that have been treated with EM in Japan have also managed to resuscitate aquatic life, bringing back all fishes and other water life forms and aquatic plants. The most famous project in Japan is the cleaning up of the Seto Inland Sea.

EM has also been employed in 130 countries in many agricultural applications and also in the production of several health products in South Africa and the USA.

Hope this technology can be promoted more around to help improve the water quality in any polluted rivers or close system ponds in an environmental friendly way.

Here is a video on how to make mud balls.
http://www.youtube.com/user/jcikulim#p/a/u/1/KO_Rv9eJry4

For more information about Effective Microorganisms Technology, here is some extra reading.
http://emproducts.co.uk/downloads/EM.pdf

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Tags:Malaysia, recycle, recycling

I am going to step away from building this time and have a look at the pollution and environmental damage from aviation sector.

I have taken two pictures in Beijing while making a trip there, we can see that the air quality is rather poor during the daytime, the visibility in the city is low and it is not due to the moisture on that day, it is air pollution! I know there are a lot of factors that contribute to the pollution, factories, cars, planes etc. But in this article, we will just focus on aviation.

According to IATA’s Director General, Giovanni Bisignani, by 2010, Asia will be the largest single market for aviation. IATA is focused on reducing fuel burn hence reducing carbon emission, with every litre of fuel saved, reduces about 3kg of CO2 emission.

For speech of the IATA’s Director General, please visit:
http://www.iata.org/pressroom/speeches/2008-02-25-01.htm

The aircraft companies are working hard nowadays to reduce the fuel consumption of their airplanes. We now see better design and better engines, all these are to help create a cleaner environment around. But there are only certain limits that the aircraft companies can do, to solve the problems, everyone (including government body, airlines companies and passengers) should play a role as well in reducing the green house gases emission. With government body, airport management groups and airline companies working on shortening routes, improving air traffic management and spreading best practice in fuel conservation, what can we as passenger do to help?

I recently read one short article from a forum in Asia, one Asian airline has set up a trial policy on certain flight route that they will ask passengers to go to the toilet before boarding the plane in order to lose some weight. By doing this, they estimated that can save around 4.2 tonnes of CO2 emission per month. I personally welcome this approach as not only you help reduce the overall weight of the plane while it’s travelling, but it also gives you bigger and cleaner spaces in modern airport’s toilet. And not to mention the washrooms queuing time that I always see inside the plane!!

Here are some extra small tips that I picked up from an airline magazine about travelling:
1. Bring clothes that can mix and match easily, so you don’t need to bring too many clothes.
2. Only bring necessary accessories.
3. Roll clothes up for tidy packing, so you can use a smaller suitcase.
4. Bring lightweight equipments for business trip.

These are just some examples how we can help to reduce carbon footprint.

Nowadays I have also seen airlines applying strict restrictions and penalties on the weight of check in and hand carry luggage, I think a lot of these penalties are purely to cover the extra fuel that the airlines might need for heavier planes and not from the environmental point of view, but it certainly will help our future generation if we start using less fuel. So let’s start travel as light as possible or even better travel less where possible!

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Tags:Building, Engineers, Environment, reduce, Welcome

Malaysia, one of the tropical countries in the South East Asia region is now moving towards Green Architecture.

After some studies in different green building rating schemes around the globe, Malaysia set up, in April 2009, a rating scheme to suit the local market, it is called Green Building Index (GBI). The GBI is an environmental rating system for buildings developed by PAM (Malaysian Institute of Architects) and ACEM (the Association of Consulting Engineers, Malaysia). It is Malaysia’s first comprehensive rating system for evaluating the environmental design and performance of Malaysian buildings based on six main categories: Energy Efficiency, Indoor Environmental Quality, Sustainable Site Planning & Management, Materials and Resources, Water Efficiency and Innovations.

The GBI scheme developed specially for the Malaysian tropical weather, environmental and development contetx, cultural and social needs. It is currently split into two types, residental and non-residental buildings.

A quick summary on the credits distribution for a residential and a non-residential building is shown below:

The GBI classification is as below:
Points                         GBI rating
86+ points                    Platinum
76 to 85 points              Gold
66 to 75 points              Silver
50 to 65 points            Certified

The scheme is still in the early stages and only a few projects are registered so far; however with a local rating scheme now in place, this will help increase the awareness over building sustainability. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done, and educatiing the building professions, government body and the public will be one of the key tasks for sustainable development in the country. Having said that, I do find articles related to sustainability and explaining  “green buildings” appearing more often in the local newspaper nowadays. And there are also presentations, talks and seminars being held across the country at different states to pass on the message and knowledge. So things are on the right track, I believe.

If you are interested in the GBI scheme, please go to their official website for more information.

I certainly would like to see more sustainable developments on the Malaysia land in the future and the GBI scheme will hopefully be the right tool/guidelines that help lead building owners, building designers and other relevant parties towards the right direction.

Ohh before I end here, IES is one of the recommended software to carry out energy modelling and other simulation tasks for certain GBI points!

Jimmy Lee

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Tags:Architects, Engineers, GBI Classification, Malaysia Green Building Index, Sustainability

Our managing director, Dr. Don McLean, came to visit me in Hong Kong for 2 days last week.  While he was here has gave a free seminar to introduce the forthcoming <Virtual Environment> version 6.0; including the new VE-Gaia, enhanced Sustainability and LEED Toolkits, and other new (hush hush) additions and enhancements.

The seminar was held in Caine Room, Level 7, of the Conrad Hotel on 26th June 2009 from 9:15am to11:30am.  We had 28 out of 35 people turn up, mainly engineers with a few architects, representatives from academic institutes and specialists in BIM. Companies included: Arup, Hyder Consulting, AECOM, Scott Wilson, Cundall, MTR, RMJM, InteliBuild, Integrated Design Associates Ltd, Form and Structure, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

We received a great response from the audience with the concept of VE-Gaia drawing the most attention - people could really see how it will be much easier for them to step from the VE-Toolkits into the full capabilites of VE-Pro using VE-Gaia.  The new features of the Sustainability and LEED Toolkits also received a lot of interest among companies working on LEED projects.

We’d like to thank everyone for attending and the assistant of Tecton Limited in organising this seminar.

Jimmy Lee

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Tags:building performance, Hong Kong, LEED, perfromance rating method, PRM, sustainable cities, V6, VE-Gaia, VE-Pro, VE-Toolkits