Due to advancing climate change, the question of balanced development becomes increasingly important. However, changes to habits and behaviors among apartment and house dwellers could reduce the use of natural resources and help with protecting the environment. These would be applicable both when it comes to energy usage, water resources, using fossil fuels, as well as generating waste and CO2 emissions. According to the European Commission statistics, buildings in Europe are responsible for 40% of our energy usage, 30% of our water usage, 50% of our natural resources usage, 33% of our waste generation, and 36% of the CO2 emissions. The housing sector constitutes 68% of all Polish usable square footage, and that is why actions directed at improving the usage of energy and resources at homes and in apartments could help us meet the goals of the Paris Accord significantly. According to the Paris agreement, we are obliged to decarbonize our economy by 2050.
In collaboration with experts, we have organized a series of educational webinars across Poland. It allowed us to spread more knowledge among the house and apartment owners and dwellers related to usage, change of behaviors, better resource management, as well as knowledge on modernizing buildings in an environmentally friendly way. Based on these meetings and experiences we have developed a balanced household guidebook, in which we present effective and savings-generating ways to run a household.
We have also created a packet of materials, including comprehensive information on the project. They are available at budynkijakludzie.plgbc.org.pl. We have conducted a national civic campaign entitled “One week at the ECO House,” composed of a number of activities encouraging change of one’s attitudes and highlighting positive effects of changing one’s behavior. We have also presented our project at the Good Practices Congress and made its way to be included on the Architectural Education Map of the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning. These actions allowed us to reach many people across the country – in total we collaborated with 50 different entities, talked to residents from large cities and small towns, universities, high schools, housing associations and others. We plan on continuing collaborating with some of these groups. We have estimated that the “One week at the ECO House” campaign reached 100,000 individuals.