Upkeep has been high-lighting the fact that good maintenance is vital for the long-term sustainability of buildings for 30 years. Now our training materials for non-technical staff also include extra information about environmental issues in existing buildings.

Buildings make a serious impact on the environment. Constructing, lighting and heating buildings contributes a signficant amount to the UK's carbon emissions. We decided to look at how Upkeep could provide people attending our training courses information about the environmental sustainability of existing buildings.

We are grateful to the students of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who helped us with this project. They surveyed non-technical staffworking in social housingto find out about their levels of awareness of climate change and environmental issues in housing.

We found a high level of interest, but also surprisingly little practical knowledge about the key issues.

So we decided to include additional material in the course notes for all the courses that comprise the City and Guilds Certificate.  We added information on environmental improvements that can be made to existing dwellings, as well as links to websites offering useful information.

Whether people apply this information at work or at home, we hope it will help them make a difference.

We are interest to hear from organisations who are using environmentally sustainable approaches in their delivery of housing, especially repairs and maintenance.

If your organisation is doing work on making properties more environmentally sustainable, we'd like to hear from you.