WOBO is pleased to receive a variety of links to reports and other activities to support professional development.
Grass Concrete retaining walls deliver attractive vertical landscapes
The residential retaining wall project comprised Betoatlas units providing a flexible build with shape and curve and a natural buff colour to tone in with its surroundings.
Wakefield based Grass Concrete Ltd has a line-up of vertical landscaping products known as the Betoconcept range. This proven range brings different shapes and styles to accommodate planting on high or low walls. The range includes Betoatlas, Betoflor, Betotitan, Leromur, Betojar, Betoplus and Betonap products offering a real variety of planting options as an alternative to what would be otherwise dull and un-inspiring structures.
The retaining wall at this residential project included a 250mm long gauge to the Betoatlas blocks, which could easily cope with the hillside profile with the edge of the wall stepping down with each course, so minimising the visual impact of the structure.
From this concave section the wall continues around the rear of the building with a series of dramatic reflex curves that show to good effect the ability to mirror rolling natural profiles.
The wall has been constructed to a Betocalcul warranted software design and features a structural backfill horizontally reinforced with Betonap geo-grid to form a composite mass wall structure.
The Grass Concrete range of Betoconcept retaining walls combine reduced noise levels with attractive vertical landscapes. Offering a variety of vertical planting options to increase the overall green envelope of a development.
Solutions for Biodiversity Net Gain & Nutrient Neutrality in New Housing Developments
To quantify biodiversity impacts, the Government has introduced tools by Natural England, like the statutory biodiversity metric and the simplified Small Sites Metric (SSM) for smaller developments. These tools allow developers to calculate biodiversity value and the required units without external consultants. Developers must then create a biodiversity gain plan to meet net gain requirements, which was praised at the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16).
The BNG framework prioritises onsite measures, followed by offsite solutions or, as a last resort, purchasing biodiversity credits. Critics argue the scheme’s complexity and added costs, especially for smaller builders. Additionally, some regions have implemented nutrient neutrality requirements to protect water ecosystems from nutrient pollution, creating further challenges for developers.
Our white paper offers valuable insights and guidance on how developers can navigate these requirements and their impact on the environment. Download White Paper
Efficient ventilation, plus so much more…How MVHR contributes to healthy modern lifestyles – By Craig Cundey, Ventilation Lead, Ubbink UK
With growing awareness of the human impact of air quality in homes and workplaces, MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) systems are becoming more widely specified all over Europe.
Here in the UK, today’s Building Regulations demand better insulated and more airtight buildings to meet the Government’s commitment to Net Zero emissions by 2050.
The Future Homes Standard 2025 will drive MVHR more than ever before, To meet the specifications set out in the 2025 FHS, the Government updated Parts F and L of the current Building Regulations at the end of 2021. These specifications must be adhered to when constructing, extending, or renovating UK homes. Part F introduces new standards for ventilation, while Part L sets out minimum energy efficiency performance targets for buildings, airtightness requirements and improved minimum insulation standards. These more rigorous requirements have applied to UK homes since June 2022.
The requirement for airtightness has created the need for a new approach to ventilation. The well-established traditional methods like trickle vents in window frames and extractor fans are no longer appropriate. This is where MVHR comes in.
What exactly is MVHR?
Designed to run continuously all year round, MVHR is a centralised, whole-house system which delivers fresh air throughout the home. It recovers heat from the warmer areas inside the home (usually kitchens and bathrooms) to raise the temperature of incoming air and thereby reduce demands on the heating system.
This warm, extracted stale/ odour laden air is passed through a heat exchanger where the heat is extracted and then used to warm the incoming fresh air, which is drawn in from the outside and filtered. The pre-warmed, filtered fresh air – free from moisture or kitchen smells – is then delivered throughout the home, via a ducting system with outlets in the ceilings, the MVHR unit will recover over 90% of the heat that would normally be wasted, delivering fresh, filtered, warmed air back into your home.
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Fathom – This month our thoughts have turned to home – or rather homes, and the lack of them. There is hardly a place in the world not grappling with the problem of a growing population and a lack of affordable housing. Let’s focus on two of them – the UK and Canada.
In the UK, the government has plans to “build, build, build” 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. Over in Canada, an estimated 5.8 million new homes are needed by 2030 to improve housing affordability.
At the same time, there’s another problem – the increasing threat of extreme weather events.
Floods and wildfires are the biggest climate threat to Canada’s housing; in 2024, records were shattered when weather-related insured losses hit $8.5bn and the UK broke similar records for weather-related in 2024.
Despite this, homes are still being built in hazard-risk areas. An analysis by the Canadian Climate Institute (CCI) found that under existing policies, more than 540,000 of the planned new houses could be built in areas exposed to hazard. That could lead to $2bn every year in additional damages from flooding alone.
The report concludes with a recommendation for policymakers and developers, which boils down to this: stop building houses on flood plains.
It sounds obvious. The trouble is it’s not always obvious where those flood plains are. While large rivers are well modeled and floodplains clearly identified, pluvial (flash) flooding, which can happen when smaller streams and rivers are overwhelmed by localized rainfall, is less well understood. That’s why Fathom makes sure its models cover pluvial flooding and it’s why the CCI recommends using up-to-date hazard information from commercial providers to identify high-risk areas.
In the end, building out of harm’s way need not jeopardize housing growth or affordability. To quote the CCI report: “The most affordable home is the one you don’t have to rebuild.” Read it here.
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“World Water Awareness” Aims to Combat Global Water Crisis
The International Code Council’s second-annual “World Water Awareness” campaign kicks off this March. Join us in raising awareness about the water and sanitation crisis and our collective responsibility to address it through long-term, consistent water conservation efforts.
Water is a fundamental human need, yet billions of people around the world lack access to safe and clean water – and the situation is projected to worsen in the years to come.
According to the World Health Organization, it is estimated that around 2 billion people do not have reliable access to safely managed drinking water and 3.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation services.
To help solve the global water and sanitation crisis, the International Code Council’s World Water Awareness campaign, which takes place annually in March, aims to raise awareness about the water crisis and our collective responsibility to address it through long-term, consistent water conservation efforts
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NIST Shares Progress Update on Surfside Condo Investigation
As NIST finalizes its investigation of the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South, the Code Council is in the process of converting Guideline 7 (created in response to the Surfside tragedy) to ICC Standard 1500.
From fires and natural disasters to other unanticipated events, when buildings fail, both people and property are at risk.
One of the most notable recent tragedies occurred in June 2021 when a 12-story condominium complex in Surfside, Florida, partially collapsed, claiming the lives of 98 people. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has spent almost four years investigating what happened at the complex, known as Champlain Towers South, to determine the cause and minimize the risk of future tragedies.
NIST recently shared with Congress an update about its investigation, noting that it has completed all experimental work on the physical evidence from the building’s structural elements. More than 600 pieces of concrete (roughly the size and shape of paper towel rolls) and nearly 400 pieces of steel were retrieved from the building.
In a video about the update, NIST associate lead investigator Glenn Bell said that machines were used to crush the concrete and pull the steel. The team wanted to “better understand the strength of the materials, how deformable they are and how their properties may have changed over the life of the building,” he said. Investigators also wanted to measure the amount and causes of corrosion extracted from steel from Champlain Towers South.
NIST hopes the investigation will reveal the likely cause or causes of the incident. Investigators plan to recommend changes to standards, codes and practices as necessary to help prevent future incidents. NIST also intends to recommend research or other appropriate actions that are necessary to improve the structural safety of buildings.
At the same time, the International Code Council has been hard at work finishing Guideline 7, which provides building departments with a guideline for visually assessing the integrity of existing buildings. The Code Council has been closely following NIST’s investigation.
“From a structural perspective, it’s looking for distress, it’s looking for things that have been altered without the right processes in place,” said Kevin McOsker, Government Relations Vice President of Technical Services for the Code Council. “The guideline is a process for a visual assessment of all the building components – structural, fire protection, mechanical, egress, those types of things – to see that it’s still within acceptable norms of compliance or if any unsafe conditions exist.”
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