Clearview South April 2014 - Issue 149 | Page 7

INDUSTRYNEWS Ecobuild 2014 - The ‘Crystal Palace Of Its Day’ With the new partnership between UK-GBC and Ecobuild for 2014 came a host of great highlights for the team. With visitor numbers up on previous years, everyone is optimistic that the sustainable built environment is finally about to have its day. By far our biggest success of Ecobuild 2014 was the Vision Wall. With contributions pouring in over twitter (#VisionWall) and many people coming to the stand to add their ideas about their vision for a sustainable built environment, it was a great example of crowd sourcing. The idea wall was soon covered with multi-coloured post-it notes and our illustrator from Scriberia got down to live drawing. The results were amazing. UK-GBC launched ‘A Defining Decade - Radically transforming the built environment by 2050’ a collection of essays written by leaders from nine major companies from across the industry on the first day of Ecobuild. The essays build on the work of the UK-GBC Leaders’ Network, which brings together senior figures from the built environment sector and were launched to coincide with the 7th annual Industry Leaders’ Dinner, which was held the same evening at City Hall. Paul King, UK-GBC CEO had a busy three days, telling Ed Davey that the government need to make energy efficiency and retrofit a national infrastructure priority during a conference discussion. In the ‘Retrofit Debate’, Paul said that the Government need to incentivise or regulate to meet energy efficiency and carbon objectives and urged all main parties to commit to retrofit 1 million homes per year by 2020. ‘Wednesday evening wa