PSBJ December 2019

Page 12

Housing

THE GREEN FUTURE OF SOCIAL HOUSING In this article, Adam Cherry from Boiler Guide looks at social housing efficiencies and how the future of heating needs to adapt to environmentally-friendly solutions with gas boiler alternatives. 2017, I found I noutDecember that I was going to become a father. As the news sunk in, I was stunned into silence as I began to process the excitement and anxiety that took over my body.

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I had a sense that everything I felt was perfectly natural, but there was another feeling I hadn’t expected: overwhelming guilt that my child would be living in a world paying the price for the

actions of previous generations – including my own. I immediately started making changes. I went vegan, I completely ruled out the idea of learning to drive – unless I could

find an instructor with an electric car (still looking), I started cycling to work, and liquid hand soap became bars of soap as we cut out single-use plastics. All of these changes and yet there’s still one thing I haven’t been able to shake the guilt of: heating my home. In my role as a Copywriter at Boiler Guide, I research and write about central heating systems and their efficiencies on a daily basis. Doing so has made me more aware of the effect that our homes are having on the planet. The residential sector is responsible for almost a quarter of all UK carbon emissions. That’s around the same as all the emissions from vehicles out on the roads. One of the main reasons why our homes are responsible for emitting such a large amount of carbon? Burning fossil fuels for central heating. As part of the UK’s target to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, it was clear that something would have to be done about how we heat our homes. And then, earlier this year, the news came from the Government that installing gas boilers into new-build homes will be banned from 2025. If Governments and councils are so serious about reducing the carbon emissions of the residential sector, they will need to lead the way with environmentally-friendly social  housing developments.


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