Why do homeowners renovate energy efficiently?:Contrasting perspectives and implications for policy

This paper contrasts two perspectives on energy efficient home renovations from applied behavioural research on energy efficiency and from sociological research on homes and domestic life. Applied behavioural research characterises drivers and barriers to cost-effective renovations, and identifies personal and contextual influences on homeowners' renovation decisions. Research findings inform policies to promote energy efficiency by removing barriers or strengthening decision influences. Sociological research on domestic life points to limitations in this understanding of renovation decision making that emphasises houses but not homes, energy efficiency but not home improvements, the one-off but not the everyday, and renovations but not renovating. The paper proposes a situated approach in response to this critique. A situated approach retains a focus on renovation decision making, but conceptualises decisions as processes that emerge from the conditions of everyday domestic life and are subject to different levels of influence. This situated approach is tractable for energy efficiency policy while recognising the ultimate influences that explain why homeowners decide to renovate

Data integration for offshore decommissioning waste management

Offshore decommissioning represents significant business opportunities for oil and gas service companies. However, for owners of offshore assets and regulators, it is a liability because of the associated costs. One way of mitigating decommissioning costs is through the sales and reuse of decommissioned items. To achieve this effectively, reliability assessment of decommissioned items is required. Such an assessment relies on data collected on the various items over the lifecycle of an engineering asset. Considering that offshore platforms have a design life of about 25 years and data management techniques and tools are constantly evolving, data captured about items to be decommissioned will be in varying forms. In addition, considering the many stakeholders involved with a facility over its lifecycle, information representation of the items will have variations. These challenges make data integration difficult. As a result, this research developed a data integration framework that makes use of Semantic Web technologies and ISO 15926 - a standard for process plant data integration - for rapid assessment of decommissioned items. The proposed solution helps in determining the reuse potential of decommissioned items, which can save on cost and benefit the environment

One Planet Living and the legitimacy of sustainability governance: From standardised information to regenerative systems

The last two decades have seen the increased use and evolving forms of governance instruments seeking to promote sustainability across increasingly complex and varied contexts. These primarily voluntary instruments combine guidance on sustainability strategy and/or monitoring with marketable public information, such as certifications, ratings and reports, to incentivise take-up. Whilst they are typically based on standardised assessment criteria, recent academic literature emphasises more context-sensitive and systems-based, or ‘regenerative,’ approaches. We evaluate these differing approaches by adapting the concept of ‘legitimacy’, often applied to product certification, for this broader family of governance instruments. Prior research finds that standardised approaches have achieved success in take-up at the expense of other aspects of legitimacy, such as programme effectiveness and informational quality. Yet there remains a need for evaluation of established instruments based on a regenerative approach. We address this need through a focus on the One Planet Living framework established by Bioregional in the UK. Using practice-embedded, mixed-methods research, we identify achievements of the framework in terms of promoting effective, participatory and generally transparent programmes. Key limitations of the more bespoke approach concern take-up, resource requirements and the integration of measurement. Governance instruments for complex strategy and monitoring have, to date, struggled to combine programme effectiveness with scalability, suggesting there remains a need to develop more scalable regenerative approaches

Hemp for textiles Growing our own clothes

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:q95/34018 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Bioregional fibres The potential for a sustainable regional paper and textile industry based on flax and hemp

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:q95/34017 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

One planet living in the Thames Gateway A WWF-UK one million sustainable homes campaign report

Title from coverAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:m03/31810 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo