Scotland to get its first carbon neutral eco-town Comments on the health implication of energy efficient dwellings.

Description

Sunday Herald. Article by Rachelle Money, with long quote from SH: Dr Stirling Howieson, director of the Centre for Environmental Design and Research (Cedar) at Strathclyde University, said some eco-homes were "tight polythene boxes for people to live in that save energy but make people deeply unhealthy". He said developers must prioritise people's health when building eco-homes. Howieson, along with a major UK building firm, is just months away from unveiling a new prototype for an eco-home, which would both save energy and cut toxins and dust mites which lead to asthma and other allergies. "In the seventies and eighties we had cold damp housing, and now we have warm damp housing. They are riddled with dust mites which we didn't used to have and that is what's driving the asthma pandemic. There is a way to optimise the conflicting demands between energy efficiency and air quality and that's what we have been working on for 15 years. It's a very specific prototype and one of the first eco-homes that actually balances energy efficiency with health." Howieson believes this kind of housing should be offered to the public. "People want hydrogen cars but they can't have them because no-one's manufactured them yet, but when they do people will buy it. We want to live a healthier way in the same way we don't want to eat toxic food with chemicals in them, we don't want to live in a toxic house that makes us ill."

Period	23 Feb 2008
Held at	The Sunday Herald, United Kingdom