Harvesting Houses For The Long Term Survival Of Our Planet (London Docks)

Harvesting Houses For The Long Term Survival Of Our Planet

Climate change has been a widely discussed topic by Gordon Brown and the UN’s third party report in the past couple of months. A lot of the questions that have been raised have been about how can we stop the climate changing so radically, in such a short space of time? Placed on the edge of the London docks a company called Unido, have started to build houses that will fit in with the ever growing environmentally friendly and green construction industry.

Unido are a Russian company that specialises in cheap and environmentally friendly homes. Unido’s technology production unit seeks out cheap and energy efficient construction designs. They plan to build a modern village of 100 energy efficient homes on the London Docks. Unido promotes Indian portable brick factories as cheap construction materials. They plan to use the portable bricks to build their houses, a Unido spokesman said that the portable bricks ‘fit together like Lego.’

The UK Government have been asking the public for years to change to energy saving light bulbs, turn down the power of their washing machines and travel to work in a shared car. This piece of land on the edge of the London docks has been seen by the company Unido as a perfect location for their modern and environmentally friendly homes. All homes contain solar panelled roofs, double glazing, mini roof fitted wind turbine, water butt, photovolactic cells and ground source heat pumps. The solar power cells will provide a family with 100% heating and hot water for the summer. The homes will cost around $3,500 which is around £1,800. Unido expects building costs to be 30-50% cheaper than the existing dwellings.

At the Think 07 exhibition Unido have found a new and ingenious product to fit to their houses, it is a pipe that is attached on the top of the roof which then goes inside the house and lets sunlight into dark rooms in the house that have no windows or lack of window light.

These ideas for creating environmentally friendly homes can also be used in other areas of industry such as transportation for example solar powered panels on cars so they can run off electricity. There is already a car called the ‘Gee-Whiz’ which runs off solar panelled energy. There are always positives and negatives when dealing with solar energy whilst living in the United Kingdom. The sun is not out all year round so you can’t run the car or store enough electricity to use the product for 365 days of the year. The London Underground could use the pipe lights to light up the terminals in the day which would reduce energy and electricity costs, whilst being environmentally friendly.
There is no easy way to compare eco friendly homes for example to compare how much solar power the house will receive and how much money you would save, there are many different factors that would determine this for example it depends on which way the house is facing and how much time the sun spends shining on the solar panels. But there is one thing we can be certain of all of these environmentally friendly products in the long run will reduce your incoming and outgoing bills. In London when you buy solar panelling for your house after 5 years of use the government will pay back certain taxes that you have paid over the last 5 years.

At the moment the United Kingdom is one of the worst polluting countries in the world and UN believes that if certain countries do not meet up with certain expectations then in the future certain countries would need a whole new planet to cope with their levels of pollution.
Sustainable technologies are technologies that do not eat up natural resources, use less energy and fewer limited resources and they do not directly or indirectly pollute the environment. This kind of technology may have a high purchase cost and maintenance requirements which may deter the general public from investing in sustainable technology.

Personal Relevance
This topic has a personal reference to me because in the future our grand children, great grand children and so on will suffer for what we have been so foolish to put right. They may suffer for the little things we have not done like turning the heat on the washing machine down, buying fuel guzzling 4x4’s and leaving the television on standby and not turning it off. All of these factors will contribute to polluting our world, maybe not in a huge way but if 30 million people leave there televisions on standby then this will cause what maybe a small, minute problem to me and you escalate into a much bigger problem in the future.

Plan of Inquiry
• I plan to follow up on my research by continuing to look at the London Docs Eco friendly homes.
• I also plan to see how other sites around the country are getting to grips with this new founded technology and other new ideas.
• I also plan to keep more updated with what is happening in other countries on the eco friendly front.

Could this be a turning point in the United Kingdom’s pollution problems? Or could this just be a new gimmick for us giving up space and practicality for a healthier world?

References
1. www.wikipedia.com
2. www.bbc.co.uk