EMBODIED CARBON COUNTS: THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF PART Z ROUND TABLE REVIEW 37
but also missed potential cost savings. She stressed it was important “not to underestimate the knowledge gap we have in the industry.” She said that increasing “baseline climate literacy” needed to be the focus, alongside consistent reporting across the industry, supporting this aim.
The knowledge gap extended to architects, said Simon Sturgis, and we needed to “develop carbon intuition” as a long-term strategy. “The numbers don’t really matter, you need people to do good things, and for carbon to just be like gravity or sunlight, just part of ‘what you do’ as an architect.”
ADVOCATING FOR GROWING CARBON LITERACY With UKGBC reporting a poor level of embodied carbon reduction in the sector, Kirsty Girvan said that increasing ‘carbon literacy’ in construction was vital
clients at the higher end of urban residential tend to be powered by investors who are “driven by things like Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation in Europe,” with the EU having its own requirements on carbon assessment of projects. Will Arnold said that in writing the Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, the key motivator was to “bring consistency” around a defi nition of a “green building” for fi nancial institutes to validate their investment. He said it “makes it far easier for a major bank to pay its green loans,” whereas until now, the fi nancial lever “[hasn’t been] working.”
Whole Life Assessment & EPDs Will Arnold called for a Ministerial Statement “setting out a timeline for introducing embodied carbon reporting, as a minimum.” He suggested this could be restricted to “products over a certain size,’ and it would give the signal the market needs, supporting all of the existing reporting initiatives, including AI-based. Simon Sturgis agreed, but added that Ministers should tackle “whole life carbon reporting, because to make a good design decision you need to understand the upfront, in-use embodied, and the energy use.” Stephanie Baker of consultant SEES added that whole life carbon assessment from cradle to grave and back around again, needs to be more in the forefront.”
Arnold said early engagement with the supply chain was needed in order to thrash out embodied carbon data, and den Dekker explained how Feilden Clegg Bradley’s carbon tool was now regularly used on projects – by 9,000 users. Diego Padilla-Philipps said however that UK designers needed to be incentivised to reduce embodied carbon, as in other markets.
Environmental Product Declarations should be standardised, as well as mandated, to harness their potential to drive reporting and reduction of embodied carbon. Ivan Jovanovich of Atelier Ten said Government had missed a trick, and that it should have demanded EPDs were “supplied for any product going into public buildings.” Lee Cowen said standardised EPDs could tackle the varied challenges in reporting embodied carbon in products. “Industry bodies produce generic EPDs for certain components that cover 40 or 50 suppliers that are bringing material in from all over the globe.” He stressed fi rms such as Milbank were “often brought in too late to infl uence what we can do to reduce cement or steel.”
Carbon literacy & the knowledge gap Sustainability specialist architect Ellen Willis said that a lack of early engagement fed into the industry’s poor record on selling its benefi ts,
Kirsty Girvan acknowledged this knowledge gap around what carbon reporting means in practice, and said it is actually amplifi ed by the fact there’s “lots of data out there.” She said that feedback from Government around Part Z was that “they’re just not sure because they’re nervous; not just in terms of how to engage with the supply chain, but how to understand that data.” Girvan said the “pushback” to Government should be that the sector propose to them “that if you implement parts, Tier 1 contractors for example will take it upon themselves to make sure that that is scaled up.” She added that the explanations required on data to increase that literacy “did not need to be complicated; it’s not lots of new training programmes, it’s literally ‘this is what this means,’ similar to an EPC.”
Stephanie Baker of consultant SEES said that designers were “asked to collect EPDs in BREEAM projects,” but “that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that anyone’s actually looking at them, and that anyone’s actually using that process to make decisions that impact the design and ultimately reduce carbon.” However, she said “it doesn’t necessarily matter where you start, I think it’s important to just start.” Cundall’s Simon Wyatt said that most contractors “sign up to embodied carbon targets for the entire building – it’s how you break that down into the sub-packages.”
Delegates highlighted the need to engage all disciplines in embodied carbon reporting, but also the challenges here. The chair James Parker cited product data directory NBS’ reported comments around the issues caused by sets of embodied carbon data being supplied in a piecemeal and inconsistent way by manufacturers, and the fi rm’s calls for a unifi ed framework. Lee Cowen said the concrete sector’s trade body had “worked with members to pull together information,” to provide a “generic EPD,” but added that the credibility of this “comes back to what is the real truth of what is being delivered by the 40 or 50 members of the trade body, based on their supply chain.” He said that the Government should “take on board some kind of mandate around how reporting and EPDs are produced, and then hold the manufacturers to account.”
Solutions
The group shared ideas on how industry could collaborate in order to both increase ‘carbon literacy’ inside and outside the sector, stimulating consumer demand, but also adopt certain proven carbon measurement routes. One was the ‘taxonomy’ approach of certifying all building elements on carbon emissions, which the EU has mandated (and which is backed by Simon Wyatt for one).
Event sponsor Lee Cowen asked how early in projects choices on
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