The UK Green Building Council is on a mission to “radically improve the sustainability of the built environment” across the United Kingdom. As a part of this mission, they call on members to submit sustainability challenges and invite the entire building industry to source solutions. In January and February of 2022, they posed a challenge called “Retrofitting Resilience” with the question, “How can existing buildings be made more resilient to climate change, with as little disruption to their occupants as possible, by 2030?” The UKGBC acknowledges that retrofitting existing buildings will play a huge role in limiting carbon emissions. They also stress the need to make buildings ready to handle the effects of climate change that will inevitably occur, regardless of what actions society takes in the near term. Buildings in the future will have to deal with heat stress and more significant temperature variability, along with the increased cost and scarcity of heating fuel, making energy-saving solutions of paramount importance. Among the proposed solutions, the UKGBC judging panel highlighted a handful of technologies that best respond to this challenge, and Hydromx was among them. The UKGBC noted the product’s effectiveness “in a wide range of applications globally, including hospital space heating, commercial space heating and cooling, hospital cooling, heat recovery and space heating in social housing. Hydromx is a retrofit solution for existing systems with no modifications required.”
