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Earlier this month, the Irish Green Building Council, or IGBC, launched its draft roadmap for the decarbonisation of Ireland’s built environment. This roadmap is looking at a cohesive strategy for decarbonisation across the whole life cycle of the built environment, which is critical.

The overlap between smart buildings, healthy buildings and zero carbon buildings is almost complete and the distinctions are few. The goal is for energy efficient, zero carbon buildings that are ‘smart’ and ‘healthy’ by virtue of the technologies used to monitor the building’s performance, reduce emissions, while increasing the health, equity and economic prosperity for owners, occupants and for the local communities.

In order for the construction industry to accelerate its push towards net-zero, an increased focus on embodied carbon needs to take place. To date, companies have been unable to give the carbon emissions embedded in the materials and products used to complete projects as much attention as their operational footprint. According to Andrew Stolworthy, the Director of Product and Market Development at SFS UK, if the industry truly intends to achieve sustainability, it needs to begin tracking embodied carbon.

Townmore is delighted to be named as a finalist in the Irish Construction Excellence Awards 2022!

The Townmore team is currently working to deliver the company’s fourth Primary Care Centre. This latest PCC is located in Cobh, County Cork and will be a great local addition for the people of Cobh, bringing much needed state-of-the-art medical facilities to the town. 

After one of the darkest weeks in Tullamore - and indeed across the country - we felt that the following words, written by Psychology student Damian McManamon, were worthy of sharing (with permission):

For the past 14 months, the Townmore team has been working on a transformative new mixed-use residential development at Southern Cross in Bray, County Wicklow for Lioncor Developments. After a short break over Christmas and New Year, the project team members are back on site and great progress is being made this week.

Earlier this year the Townmore staff set the ambitious target of walking a combined 5 million steps in order to raise much-needed funds for Dóchas, a charitable organisation providing holistic cancer support services to people whose lives have been impacted by cancer.

Traditional construction is changing. Digitisation and decarbonisation are the main drivers of this change, however, there is still a huge amount of confusion around what sustainability really looks like for this industry. In fact, the wider built environment has been criticised in recent months for ‘greenwashing’ its sustainability credentials and promoting activities that fail to make a meaningful positive impact on the environment and ignoring some of the bigger challenges.

In 2018, the Construction Sector Group, or CSG, was set up by the Government to act as a communications bridge between policymakers and the industry, tasked with ensuring regular and open dialogue between government and members of the industry. At the core, this initiative is intended to ensure that all parties across the public and private sector are working towards the common aim of delivering Project Ireland 2040.