Your Carbon Footprint
The Carbon Footprint is a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted through the burning of fossil fuels. From a residential and commercial building perspective, it is the amount of carbon generated when you produce a kilowatt of electricity. Reducing a building’s carbon footprint will ultimately reduce electricity bills and save money for every individual household or business. It will also help meet the UK target for the reduction of emissions, as well as allowing you to help the environment.

The burning of fossil fuels to create electricity is a global issue and unless we speed up our response to seeking alternatives, the damage we are doing to the environment is possibly irreversible.

British homeowners are wasting around £6.5 billion pounds a year by failing to install energy efficient products, that’s about £298 wasted for every household in the UK. Vent-Axia is committed to producing energy efficient ventilation products for residential and commercial buildings. Since we first launched the LoWatt domestic range in 1997, we have continued to develop energy saving solutions every few years up to the recent launch of the Sentinel Demand Ventilation range in 2006. Ventilation is only a minor electrical consumer but when used as part of an overall environmental strategy LoWatt ventilation can go a long way in reducing the overall carbon footprint.

Global Warming
Carbon dioxide is just one of the six greenhouse gases that have been deemed as the main contributors to global warming. Methane, Nitrous Oxide, Hydro Fluorocarbons, Per Fluorocarbons and Sulphur Hexafluoride are the other five.

The increased usage of these gases throughout the 20th century has contributed to global warming by causing the Greenhouse Effect. The sun omits radiation in the form of heat and light. The majority of the radiation is kept at bay via the Ozone Layer, an invisible barrier that protects the earth. The growing use of CFC’s over the past few years has depleted this barrier allowing the earth to become more susceptible to the sun’s harmful rays, hence global warming. Most of the rays are reflected off the surface of the planet and dissipate in space, however the combination of the 6 greenhouse gases has created another barrier around the planet which this time reflects that heat back to the earth’s surface and creates the Greenhouse Effect.

Climate Change Programme
The Government’s energy strategy sets out four headline goals:

• to mitigate climate change
• to strengthen energy security
• to eliminate fuel poverty
• to improve economic competitiveness.

It is the Government’s belief that all of these objectives can be achieved together through action to improve the sustainability of our energy supplies and reduce overall demand.

The Government has a statutory aim (as required by the Sustainable Energy Act 2003), to save 3.5 million tonnes of carbon from residential properties in England through energy efficiency measures by 2010. A further target was set in the Housing Act 2004, which requires the Secretary of State to take reasonable steps to improve residential energy efficiency by at least 20 per cent by 2010 from a year 2000 baseline.

The Climate Change Programme sets out how energy efficiency will save 10.2 million tonnes of carbon (MtC) per year by 2010. These savings will be split between the business sector (5.1MtC); the household sector (4.8MtC); and the public sector (0.3MtC).

Targets for Energy Savings

Households	Millions of tonnes of carbon per year by 2010
Building regulations	1.5
Energy Efficiency Commitment	2.1
Warm Front	0.4
Market Transformation/labelling/product standards	0.4
Other household sector measures	0.5
Household sector total	4.9
Climate Change Agreements	2.9
The Carbon Trust	1.1
Building regulations (non housing)	0.6
SME support policies	0.2
Public sector	0.5
Business/public sector total	5.3
OVERALL TOTAL	10.2

Document L and F
In September 2005, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister announced new measures to make buildings more energy efficient, saving over one million tonnes of carbon each year. These measures taken together with the 2002 Building Regulations aim to improve standards by up to 40%.

On 6th April 2006, the new Building Regulations Part F ventilation) and Part L (energy efficiency) became effective.

The Government’s commitment to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, requires buildings to be more airtight and more energy efficient. Air tightness is now measurable and defined in Part L of the building regulations. The developments in Part F reflect these changes, accounting for the requirement to ventilate efficiently for human comfort and health, whilst using proven technology such as heat recovery ventilation and energy saving LoWatt motors to achieve this. Vent-Axia has been active for over 10 years in supplying heat recovery solutions to countries around the world, whose building regulations already demand this most effective, sustainable and energy efficient of ventilation solutions.

Recycling
In addition to developing solutions for the recycling of ventilation systems, the Volution Group will optimise the product design of its future models to ensure that as much as the product as possible can be recycled to make use of secondary raw materials. This strategy will decrease the overall consumption of energy and resources in production, whilst completing the cycle for the re-use of materials.