Dr. Oliver Kinnane:

I agree totally with the heat pump comment. The leakage of F-gases from heat pumps could be a big issue going forward. The embodied carbon of a heat pump is already quite significant at about 4 megatonnes so we need to limit that through its lifetime. We also need to make timber construction easier. The restrictions at the moment are very limiting to timber construction, particularly as we go to mid-rise or high-rise construction. These technologies are well-proven by our near neighbours. The UK is doing an awful lot of timber construction at the moment and we are lagging behind on that. We need greater investment in facilities for bio-based materials in the country. I was talking to somebody from Hemp Federation Ireland last week and they said there is good uptake and growth of hemp, which is a well-proven material used across the Continent, but there is no national processing facility here so it has to be exported and imported back in. If we are going to use hemp as insulation, or hempcrete as a material in our home industry, we are talking about transformation across the industry. The waste situation is worrying and unsustainable. We are reducing the number of landfills, yet we are specifying that nearly all our construction waste needs to go to landfill. That is going to increase quite a lot with the increase in construction.