Exploring housing resource consumption associations with sustainable housing design and occupant attitudes: A south-east Queensland study

Abstract

Sustainable development is promoted as a means to address climate change impacts and sustainable design is believed to have a strong role in determining the operational performance of housing. However, in relation to residential housing, these assertions have been largely untested by academic research and occupant impacts are not often considered alongside design influences. Consequentially, the present study aimed to investigate whether sustainably designed housing actually has less impact on the environment and the extent to which occupant attitudes play a role in any reduction, for technical and non-technical factors. The study was able to compare 75 houses drawn from a conventional housing estate and a sustainability-focused residential community. The latter community imposed strict environmental building codes. The conventional housing community, which was designed using contemporary methods, did not preference or require the application of sustainable design principles and was used as the “control group”. The houses within the second estate (the “study group”) employed a high level of sustainable design principles, including solar energy, intentional building orientation, natural ventilation, no air conditioning, recycled materials, reduced indoor environment toxicity and solar passive design. Utility consumption data and surveys were used to gather the data in early 2011. The “study group” houses were found to use 75 per cent less net energy (5.7kWh per day) compared with the “control group” of conventional homes. Interestingly, the water consumption for both types of housing was found to be very similar, although the study group had implemented its own internal rainwater capture and recycling system, which uses no water from the central town water system. It was hypothesised that among the variables studied, multiple regression analysis showed that the number of occupants and then a house’s sustainable design, influenced energy consumption the most, suggesting that sustainable design of a house is a key factor in reducing household utility use. In contrast, environmental attitudes and the size of the house, explained less than one per cent of the variance in energy use, further highlighting the value of sustainable design attributes in terms of operational energy reduction. The results also suggested that the sustainable design of a house is twice as likely to reduce its energy consumption compared with the influence of pro-environmental attitudes. The survey results revealed that higher levels of attitudes favourable to environmental conservation correlated with lower energy use, but attitudes were not found to offer any statistically significant independent prediction of energy use when analysed with other predictor variables present. Similarly, the results were not able to demonstrate that environment-based attitudes and behaviours contributed significantly to lower energy use, when other demographic housing design factors had already been taken into account. In conclusion, the study suggests that stronger prioritisation of the sustainable design attributes in housing will significantly reduce anthropogenic environmental impact. Similarly, it appears possible to undertake such actions without impacting occupant well-being.