The BRITA in PuBs Information Tool is being developed within the EU 6th Framework integrated project “Bringing Retrofit Innovation to Application in Public Buildings - BRITA in PuBs”. The project has its main focus on the design, realisation, monitoring a

The BRITA in PuBs project (Bringing Retrofit Innovation To Application in Public Buildings)aims at increasing the market penetration of innovative and effective retrofit solutions toimprove energy efficiency and implement renewables, with moderate additional costs.In the first place, this is realised by the exemplary retrofit of 8 public demonstrationbuildings in the four participating European regions (North, Central, South, East).

Most advantage eco buildings libraries select, organize, retrieve, and transmit tacit andexplicit information/knowledge. Different reports contained an explicit criticism of thelibraries focus on their specific collections and a recommendation to focus more on userneeds. There is a need to overpass the key limitations in the development of traditionallibraries, which have been developed for a particular content and a specific group oflearners. We suppose that the future libraries will become a practical knowledgestorehouse and will offer intelligent opportunities for people.

A Post Occupancy Evaluation was performed in the Administration and Student ServicesBuilding (ASSB) in Southampton University as part of the European project SustainableArchitecture Applied to Replicable Public-Access Buildings (SARA). This building wasfinished in the spring of 2006, and the staff has been asked to comment on itsperformance over the first summer and winter.

An analysis of the energy consumption of the built environment in Europe shows that themain challenge to achieve substantial energy reductions in this sector lies in improving theenergy efficiency of the existing stock rather than in designing and building energy efficientnew dwellings. This challenge is especially pungent when taking into account the buildingstock of former Eastern European countries, where energy efficiency was never a greatissue and where investments in energy efficiency are difficult to find.This is area where the EU - funded project Demohouse is focusing on.

In European demonstration projects the main interest is in new technologies and in how tospread the application of best practices. Strategies to manage processes and to involvestakeholders are less developed. When technologies fail to have the calculated energyperformance, then occupant behaviour is mentioned as the unknown variable. Often theoccupants are viewed as a problem group rather than the starting point for innovations.It is possible to develop projects bottom up and to reach high performance qualitynonetheless.

The objective of this work package was to develop a quality/performance control tool-box model – a concept from design to post construction life long management, using also BEMS/REMS-type procedures and prevailing methods. Quality control toolbox concept

The incidence of asthma and allergy has increased throughout the developed worldover the past forty years (1). The incidence is much higher for children than adults.From being a relatively uncommon disease, a few decades ago, allergies today, inmany regions, are affecting a large part of the population. The European AllergyWhite Paper (1997) noted that with the exception of AIDS, only few diseases, besidesallergies, have increased two- or three-fold within a short time (2). Allergic diseasesare supposed to be caused by a complex interaction between genetic andenvironmental exposures.

indoor exposures, such as VOCs, phthalates, tobacco smoke and biological agents.This paper focuses solely on the biological exposures. Exposures to allergens,microbial agents and other biological particles are risk factors to these health effects,but the exact causal connections or the mechanisms underlying the symptoms are stillnot well understood. Among the open questions are e.g.

Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the world and accounts for 12.3% of allnew cancer in Europe. About 375,000 new cases of lung cancer were estimated forEurope in 2000; 303,000 in men and 72,000 in women. The number of deaths wasabout 347,000 (280,000 in men and 67,000 in women). However, there are substantialdifferences in incidence of lung cancer in the different regions and populations withinEurope (Tyczynxki, 2003).