ALCAS is delighted to announce The Footprint Company as a bronze sponsor of the inaugural AusBuildLCA, the 1st Life Cycle Assessment Conference for Building and Construction.

The Footprint Company (TFC) are world leaders in Life Cycle Assessment as well as developers of cloud based LCA software for property portfolios, higher education campuses, buildings, tenant fit outs and materials.

With more than 25 years in the business of sustainable design and building, TFC partners with some of the world’s most respected researchers, professionals and thought and sector leading clients.

Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Dr Caroline Noller pioneered embodied carbon and ecological footprinting of property assets in Australia. She has developed and delivered corporate responsibility and sustainability strategy along with GRI reporting for three of the largest property groups in Australia – The GPT Group, Lendlease and Australand.

“Efficiency and evidenced based sustainable design practice can help solve the challenge of design excellence within ecological limits,” Caroline explains.

The Ecological Footprint calculates humanities demand on nature and communicates it tangibly in terms of hectares per person (or Planets) as well as tons of carbon – giving an understanding of how much we have, how much we use, and who uses what.

The method was developed in the 1980s to question how many people the earth can support at a given level of consumption.

“Ideally, global resources would be used at a sustainable rate enabling humanity to live well within the means of One Planet. Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources drives global ecological overshoot, which means depleting the resources on which human life and biodiversity depend,”

“AusBuildLCA has been fundamental in highlighting exemplar case studies nationally and abroad, showcasing opportunities in the built and infrastructure environment, and encouraging organisations to be leaders and step beyond what others are doing,” concludes Caroline.

The future of urban city farming was discussed at AgriFoodLCA, The 1st Life Cycle Assessment Conference for Agriculture and Food in Melbourne on 24th of November.

Hosted by the Australian Life Cycle Assessment Society (ALCAS), the national peak body for LCA professionals, the conference featured Powerplants’ Technical Supervisor and Product Manager for LED Lighting Tony Bundock.

He shared the latest developments in LEDs in city farming in his presentation ‘Vertical farming – the future of high performance crop management’.

“We asked Tony to present at our conference, as vertical farming exhibits some interesting life cycle characteristics” says former ALCAS President Rob Rouwette. “Artificial lighting obviously requires energy, while on the other hand water and nutrients can be administered with virtually no waste.”

“The system as a whole will open up a whole new world of opportunities in growing in non-traditional areas and structures,” explains Tony.

“Stacking plant beds upward instead of outward allows farms to be built in dense urban areas. LEDs use less than half the power of fluorescent lights and run cooler but prices have been historically high. Latest developments see costs come down, and we are also getting better at finding the optimal light colours for each plant.”

As part of its commitment to the development of urban city farming, Philips has just installed a large demonstration GrowWise centre at its Netherlands hub. Philips’s city farming group aims to create modular, scalable systems to simplify construction of vertical farms. The group has nearly tripled in manpower this year, and Philips plans to expand and invest further through 2016. Learn more about the project by watching this video.