Zero Ambitions Podcast

The first episode of January 2025 marks the long overdue, first appearance of Jay Stuart , a long-time friend and colleague of Jeff and a firm fixture of the green building scene in Ireland.  Jay joined us to talk about his latest project: Loop Your Spare . It’s a SaaS platform designed to match 'spare' construction materials with projects that need them on other sites before they have a chance to...

What's it like trying to scale a retrofit start-up? This episode welcomes Max Bloomfield and Alex Whitcroft , two of the folks from VundaHaus , to talk about their product, its ongoing design and development, and their preparations to scale the business as they raise investment. VundaHaus designs and manufactures a rapid-fit insulation solution for external wall insulation (EWI) of residential hom...

This week's episode is all about the lessons learned in carrying out a low-carbon retrofit. Natalie Black ( Enbee Architecture + Design ) and Toby McLean ( Allt Environmental Structural Engineers ) joined us to talk through their experiments and experiences on the renovation of a derelict house in Muswell Hill, London that was shortlisted for the Architects Journal Retrofit and Reuse awards this y...

Our guest, Liz Male has been on our radar for a while. She is a figure who has been working in the construction sector since the 1990s, an ally to the sustainability sector, a great communicator, and an experienced thinker. When we met earlier in the year we talked about a lot of things, but the consistent theme of our conversation was 'why we need to tell better stories about the built environmen...

Apologies for the delay, the lost podcast has been returned and is ready for release. ' Don't Waste Buildings ' should be a straightforward proposition. It seems obvious. Especially so in the face of the climate crisis. Unfortunately, the business of the built environment is not yet on board completely. Our guests for this episode are the founders of UK-based campaign group Don't Waste Buildings ,...

This week we're speaking with Steven Heath, technical director at Knauf Insulation (UK and Ireland) and a really interesting and experienced person in the sector. So while we had him, we ran through a bunch of our favourite hoary subjects: measuring performance, performance guarantees, and what we think about EPCs. Knauf is a firm that's done some really interesting work in all of these areas and...

A long-overdue episode with friend of the show, Lloyd Alter, about a blog he wrote and his book "The Story of Upfront Carbon". We get into the language of sustainability, carbon, and lots of the words that are ubiquitous in this space (sustainability and the built environment, obviously). We get into the sustainability of travel, to some extent too, Lloyd's book: The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a...

A wise woman once said: "sustainability is the doing, ESG is the talking about it". Today an Irish house-building giant has made a major move on Passive House — publishing a positioning paper and announcing the ongoing construction of over 1,700 homes to the standard. Joining us to talk about this are Nicola Cronin (Senior Sustainability Analyst) and  Stephen O'Shea (Head of Sustainable Constructi...

Jeff invited Mhairi Grant , co founder of award-winning architectural practice Paper Igloo, to join us to talk about the challenges of ensuring that one's ideas for sustainable design actually make their way through to the construction phase. The subject was sparked by a conversation she and Jeff had about lessons learned from a flawed project (that we discuss) and what it takes to ensure that our...

Why is making UK homes more efficient so difficult? So asked journalist Leyla Boulton earlier this year in the pages of the Financial Times. Seeing a retrofit article in the FT piqued our interest, even more so once we realised Leyla is a senior editor with an esteemed background in political and environmental reporting. She was reporting on Kyoto where no one cared. Since beginning her retrofit j...

In the UK every day the construction industry produces enough waste to fill a football stadium. Rightly, former guest, Chris Clarke (SCAPE) has got a bee in his bonnet about construction waste and is making efforts to draw attention to the issue. He's not just concerned with the profligate use of resources and the impact on carbon emissions, it's the lackadaisical nature of the waste itself. Waste...

Something-like twelve months on from inception we thought we'd catch up with what's happening at Living Places , the multi-disciplinary, impact-focused consultancy co-founded by this week's guest Cat Magill . Where last year Rufus Grantham came on the podcast to tell us all about the organisation he was in the midst of founding, this year Cat joined us to tell us about what they've been up to. The...

This week's guest is Caroline Ashe Brady of KORE Retrofit in Ireland, one of the objectively successful one-stop-shop retrofit providers to have emerged over the past few years. Caroline is a business leader who we’re a proper fan of, so apologies in advance for our ‘so Caroline please tell us, why are you so great’ style questioning. That said, you can trust us in this opinion, we’ve done the wor...

Returning champion Lisa Ann Pasquale rejoins us on Zero Ambitions to talk about dogs and retrofit. Mainly retrofit though. Informed by Lisa's experiences as a retrofit coordinator, technical lead at RetrofitWorks, and Technical Manager at The Retrofit Academy she knows an awful lot about the challenges faced by retrofit practitioners. Windows, ventilation, product information, and the inflexibilit...

Returning champion Ellora Coupe joins us to talk about the recent report that Her Own Space has published about the place of women in the retrofit sector, which is heartening, insightful, and damning in equal measure. A great piece of work that everyone interested in the sector should heed. Perhaps more importantly, she's with us to promote the incoming launch of its professional sister network He...

This week we're going by Joseph Little , Head of Construction & Building Performance in the School of Architecture, Building and Environment at TU Dublin. He joined us to talk about the journey he's been on leading the MSc in Building Performance over the last seven years, but we got into a lot more. Joseph has been deeply involved in the promotion of better building standards by measuring the...

This week we're thinking about retrofit differently with Dan Hill from Dark Matter Labs (DML). Or rather, we're talking about retrofit's potential to become a movement for social change. In reality, retrofit is about much more than fabric and economics, it's about people and how they live. With that in mind we should be thinking much more about engagement. This is itself a massive challenge becaus...

This week we're joined by Iva Merheim Eyre from SMARTER4EU to talk about her recently published report the Catalogue of Good Practices , a document that details a variety of place-based hybrid finance models that have been used to rebuild and renovate homes in locations as wide-ranging as the postwar Balkan states to London's own Westminster. This is all part of a concerted effort to use finance t...

Jeff and Dan are joined by Dr. Peter Rickaby again. We were due a catch up so we recorded the conversation because he's always interesting.  Peter should need little introduction, so we'll just say he's our favourite retrofit expert (sorry everyone else) and our most frequent guest on the show.  He's only returned to the pod, not to the UK. In principle he's migrated to South Africa and is suppose...

This week we're joined by Nesta's Deputy Mission Director, Andrew Sissons, to discuss his take on why the UK has such a weird relationship with heat pumps. It was inspired by an excellent Twitter thread on the subject that gained quite a bit of attention the other week. We talk through it all so you might as well listen, or just take a look at the thread, either way it should be interesting. Notes...

The other week we had a chance to have a conversation with Cypren Edmunds, President of the European Straw Building Association about building with straw, experiences in retrofit, and the meandering path that led him to the green building trade. For us, it was a really interesting chat because we got to talk about how he got into greed building via sport, the music industry, and playing an active...

The Recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is now enshrined in EU law, which has big implications for the built environment everywhere. Even the South East of England. To mark the occasion and get the lowdown on what this all means, we invited friend of the show Ciarán Cuffe back on to talk about it. For those who might not remember, he's the Irish Green Party MEP and Rapporteur to the E...

Kate Crawford is a building nerd who is obsessed with measuring performance. She's currently, Technical Director at KLH Sustainability , a multidisciplinary consultancy working in the built environment. Kate has a very interesting background in terms of her experience and she's now working on a very fascinating project in which she's researching and developing a "Smart Meter Enabled Thermal Energy...

This week we're talking about modular construction and Natural Building Systems with MD Chloe Donovan . Chloe is a really interesting character with a fascinating product that she's bringing to market. Unusually, she's a farmer who got into building and then found herself as an entrepreneur in the febrile world of modular building and MMC. We talk about all sorts, from the challenges of propagatin...

Up next we're speaking with Falk Bleyl , CTO at Utopi , about their sensor-based data platform technology. He describes it as an ESG platform which is true but it massively underplays the true value of what their product offers. Heads up, normally, we'll at least try to couch the conversation within a broader context but in this episode, we've barely bothered. We were content just to talk about th...