The joint Ciria and Sustain event on whole life carbon in construction held in London on 15th November was a great success with over 100 delegates benefiting from hearing from several informative experts in this area and being inspired by a fantastic array of case studies. Matt Fulford, Head of Buildings at Sustain who chaired the day gives his overview of the speakers;
Dr Craig Jones, Senior Associate at Sustain and author of the ICE/Bath database opened the event with a clear overview of embodied carbon, what it is and how it fits into the wider issue of sustainability. It was clear that every step in the life cycle of a building emits carbon and while the embodied carbon currently accounts for 20-35% of the overall whole life carbon emissions, Craig made the case about the greater significance of these to the climate issues today as they are emitted as one large release all in one year, whereas the operational emissions are slowly emitted over a long period of time and have a chance to be improved. The good news was that it is straight forward to save over 20% of these embodied emissions. Further focus was place on embodied carbon with the two facts that as grid emissions reduce embodied carbon will become more of a significant factor as will the drive towards zero carbon (operational) buildings through building regulations. After setting out a wide array of standards that could possibly be adding to the confusion rather than clarity in this area Craig went on to highlight that embodied carbon is not as obvious as it first seems and that sensible transport strategies can play a key role although it is often more about what products are on the truck than the truck itself. View Craig's presentation Embodied Carbon and Supply Chains.
Professor Peter Walker from University of Bath then took the stage to share with the delegates his thoughts on future innovation in building materials which will help to reduce the embodied carbon impacts. It was very much a call of back to nature with examples of natural materials including Hemp and Straw which can use photosynthesis to lock in carbon to a building creating a carbon sink within the building itself. As 5% of the global carbon emissions are from cement products the structural qualities of natural materials used for centuries should have a renaissance. Pete also highlighted that such natural materials also have other beneficial properties and one has to look beyond the static state measures of U values to hygrothermic attributes to fully appreciate the benefits that can be achieved. View Pete's presentation Renewable Materials and Low Carbon Buildings.
Dr Owen Jenkins from Ciria then explained how keeping abreast of the carbon issue is a key challenge for construction organisations and called for all to get up and remain up to speed with carbon issues. He detailed how investment is needed to maintain the leading edge in this regard and the bewildering amount of information available. He went on to explain how Ciria is supporting construction organisations by sourcing information from leaders in the field and sharing it with the rest of those in the industry through the briefing papers which have an impressive degree of credibility and quality through their production methods. View Owen's presentation CIRIAS Carbon Leaders Project.
After a short break Andrew Powell from the Environment Agency put in to context how they have applied the embodied carbon issue to their projects through the carbon calculator tool which they have been using since 2008 and is available freely from their website. He described how the tool has been recently updated embedding the benefits of their experience in using it over the past 3 years. Andrew then provided analysis of how the EA's carbon footprint is 6,000 tonnes from the energy for its internal operation but 50,000 from the embodied carbon associated with its projects. He then shared a fascinating insight in to real actions that projects have made to reduce this embodied carbon impact from prefabrication to transportation by boat and how these have saved 2,000 tonnes of embodied carbon and also £500,000 of cost. View Andrew's presentation Construction Carbon Calculator.
Richard Gotheridge from Balfour Beatty then went on to explain how they have taken the EA's carbon calculator and used it for wider benefit in non-EA projects with an approach of why invent another tool when there is already a good one out there? Figures shared from many leading construction projects showed that the most significant gains can be made by focusing on the big issues and not worrying about every last detail. In all cases it was the concrete, frame and reinforcement that came up top of the embodied carbon impact but with an interesting finding on one project of how significant the carpet was. View Richard's presentation Balfour Beatty Carbon Calculations.
The delegates then had an opportunity to pose questions to all the mornings speakers for half an hour covering issues of the most appropriate metrics to be used, where the boundaries should lie, how big ones reduction ambitions should be and whether the carbon issue can be considered as similar to Greek debt!
Following a lunch session where the delegates took the opportunity to network and debate issues further is never the easiest slot but Holly Knight from the Olympic Delivery Authority soon captured the attention of all the delegates with her fascinating insight in to the sustainability features of the world's biggest event and the £9.3bn project behind it. She posed the question of challenging whether there is a need to build permanent structures and highlighted how buildings such as the basket ball arena have been designed to be taken down and reused again in another location (currently looking at Rio or Glasgow!). Other interesting facts were shared as to how the London stadium will be the lightest ever built, how it is bolted together to allow for reuse of members and how 20% of the steelwork in it comes from reused gas pipes. Holly also clearly demonstrated how leading design (from Zahid Hadid) need not be carbon intensive, described how they had managed to reduce the embodied carbon by 32% on that building and if you can do it there then there is little excuse for others not to make significant reductions. View Holly's presentation Carbon and the London 2012 Olympic Park.
Peter Johnson from Kier then examined the other end of the scale and showed how one person's operational carbon is the next person embodied carbon and gave the contractors view. He explained how they have focused on their operation site carbon emissions giving detailed examples of simple actions they have taken with site lighting to make very significant reductions in their onsite carbon emissions, halving their energy use through LED lighting, dual circuit transformers and other actions which also added to benefits in health and safety and cost reduction. Summarising he clearly outlined the potential for the UK construction industry to save over 10,000 tonnes of carbon from site lighting alone. View Peter's presentation Temporary Site Lighting.
The final two sessions of the day started to draw together the operational and embodied carbon elements to give the whole life approach. First Sean Lockie from Faithful and Gould outlined the possibilities that exist within the existing building stock to undertake a deep green retrofit to reduce the operation carbon while maintaining much of the existing elements to reduce the embodied carbon impact. Finally Dr Jon Atkinson from Halcrow and Mark Wary formerly of SWRDA detailed the work they did together on 3 offices in the south west examining the embodied carbon impact of higher standards of sustainable new builds. The results showed that while buildings with higher BREEAM ratings or approaching zero carbon did have larger embodied carbon impacts this carbon was, in all cases, paid back in less than 5 years through the reduced operation carbon emissions. View Sean's presentation Retrofit for the Future and Jon and Mark's presentation Sustainable Offices.
