A POISONED patch of wasteland in East London is about to blossom into Britain’s first green eco-suburb — a housing estate purpose-built to leave no trace of a “carbon footprint”.

Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor, and the London Development Agency will choose a contractor next month to start building the zero-carbon suburb on the site of a former gasworks at Gallions Park, Docklands. It will be the prototype for a new species of urban development.

As political leaders debated ways of meeting their commitments to reducing carbon dioxide emissions this week, one of the most radical solutions — Britain’s first “ecopolis” — was starting to take shape.

After visiting a vast new eco-city under construction outside Shanghai, Mr Livingstone brought in the engineering consultancy Arup to lay out a conceptual blueprint for an estate of 230 houses on three acres that will be self-sufficient in energy, with CO2 emissions reduced to virtually nothing. One of six shortlisted companies bidding for the building contract will be selected by the Mayor next month.

The buildings will be designed to maximise energy efficiency, using sustainable, low-carbon materials. Heating will be provided to the complex from a combined heat plant, powered by renewable fuel such as wood chips from sustainable forests. Additional energy will come from renewable sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaic panels on rooftops.

The planners have also been investigating Swedish technology, which harnesses biogas from organic waste and sludge, allowing communities to harness energy effectively from kitchen waste and the effluvia of its lavatories. The roofs of the buildings may be planted with stonecrop or sedum plants to absorb rainwater that would otherwise run into sewers, while solid waste may be sucked through underground pipes by vacuum to a central sorting point, then removed at night.

Alex Bax, the senior policy officer at the Greater London Authority, concedes that it is impossible to build a large housing estate without any CO2 emissions: bricks must be fired, cement must be mixed. But each stage of the building plan will be scrutinised to ensure the lowest possible carbon emissions.

“Once we start building like this, then the developers won’t want to do anything less,” Mr Bax said. “It will become the unique selling point of the area.”

The London Development Agency owns more sites near by, and Gallions Park is expected to become the nucleus of a series of linked carbon-zero estates, generating heat, electricity and even cooling via a local network independent of the national grid.

Some two-thirds of the energy currently generated in Britain’s outdated electricity network is wasted through chimneys and power lines before it reaches the home.

Building a carbon-zero suburb is expected to cost between 5 and 10 per cent more than standard, but property prices in the new “green belt” are also expected to be higher, partly because people want to live in a non-polluting environment, but mainly because of the huge potential savings in energy bills. In the Swedish eco-town of Hammarby Sjöstad, on which the Gallions Park project is partly modelled, property prices are up to 10 per cent higher than in comparable areas of Stockholm.

“We are not expecting people to live hermit-like green lives,” Mr Bax said. “It’s not about lifestyle. People will still fly to Spain for their holidays and perhaps have a car.” On the other hand, the suburb is certain to attract environment-friendly buyers, with a cumulative effect on the community and surrounding neighbourhoods. It will be a brave resident of Gallions Park who drives a four-wheel-drive gas-guzzler.

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