IN PERSON
SUSTAINING INNOVATION BMJ talks to Knauf Insulation’s new managing director,
Neil Hargreaves about innovation, priorities and sustainability M
y first priority as managing director is to continue building a highly customer-centric organisation focused on delivering the best
outcomes for our customers. We’re putting customers at the core of the whole organisation so that they really drive a lot of what we do, including R&D. 90% of our innovation – whether product, solution or service – will come from engaging with our customer base. I also want us to continue playing our part in delivering better performing buildings in the future. Beyond innovating, that means giving merchants and installers the information they need to choose and install them correctly. We’re also working to raise the profile of insulation among the wider population, so it becomes part of the thought process when buying a new home for example. When you buy a car you look at its miles per gallon and CO2 emissions. We want homeowners to take the same approach when buying a house or planning an extension – what will it cost me to run? What about acoustics and noise levels? How does it add to fire safety? We want to raise the profile of insulation and its perceived value to end users, which for merchants will mean more demand for value-added products. The UK needs to drastically reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and insulation can play a huge part in meeting the UK’s carbon objectives without wholesale lifestyle changes. There are a lot of converging factors driving change in the built environment. You’ve got the target of a net zero carbon UK by 2050, which given that over 40% of carbon emissions come from buildings, will mean massive changes. Then there’s the government’s commitment to halve energy consumption in new buildings as part of its industrial strategy. Plus the proposed Future Homes Standard which will ban fossil fuel heating in new homes by 2025 and demand “world-leading levels of energy efficiency”.
Think about the push to switch from gas to electric heating. Electric heating is considerably more expensive per kilowatt hour, so for individual households, homes that don’t perform will expose them to totally avoidable high energy bills. At a national level, that avoidable extra demand for electricity means you need to build additional generating capacity; especially challenging at a time when we’re trying to generate power for an electrified transport system. Adding this capacity would increase individual bills further too.
So, the thermal performance of the building fabric will be under the microscope like never before, and insulation will play a central role. It’s the most cost-effective way to improve building performance. It’s sustainable if you use the right products. It’s passive – it doesn’t require big lifestyle changes – and it’s proactive – it’s not about dealing with the effects of emissions, but about preventing them in the first place.
Energy gap
The government has recognised that we need to close the energy performance gap between buildings as-designed and buildings as-built to make the transition to a zero carbon economy as pain-free as possible for households. That’s very much about new build homes, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the emissions coming from existing building stock. This is especially important because it’s estimated that 80% of buildings in 2050 already exist today. In recent years government policy has retreated from the challenge of retrofitting existing housing stock with insulation, but this is an issue that needs addressing urgently. We’re planning to work with government to develop a clear strategy to reduce emissions through retrofit and refurbishment of existing buildings. And that brings up another important point. While we face significant challenges in terms of building energy and carbon emissions, we mustn’t just think in terms of thermal performance. We need to create resilient homes that protect occupants from a range of threats – fire, flood, air and noise pollution. The right insulation creates buildings that last a lot longer considering these other performance factors and so reduces the likelihood of early obsolescence, especially as building regulations become more stringent. There are things manufacturers can do in terms of their role in the wider building supply chain, and also things they can do
20 in terms of their own operations.
For the former, we need to engage with the industry at every level. We have a role to play in connecting with homeowners to generate more demand for high performance insulation and with contractors and installers to help them track products and install them correctly. We need to work with our merchant partners giving them the support and resources they need to sell value-added products. We also need to work with the government to ensure that the building regulations are fit for purpose. As for us individually, it’s about ensuring we are delivering the right products and solutions to the market. We must be innovative and prepared to invest in manufacturing capability to meet the needs of customers today and in the future. This is one of the benefits of Knauf Insulation being a family-owned business – we can take a long-term view and make long- term investments in our products and our manufacturing plants to drive innovation. By its very nature, Glass Mineral Wool is a highly sustainable product. We use up to 80% recycled content in manufacture, thanks in part to our partnership with Veolia. On a site next door to our St Helens manufacturing plant, they process the equivalent of 350 million recycled glass bottles into cullet, which we then turn into high performance energy-saving insulation. Using ‘furnace-ready’ recycled glass reduces our reliance on virgin raw materials and having the facilities next door to one another saves 375,000 miles of road journeys each year. This year is also the tenth anniversary of our ECOSE® Technology bio-based binder. The binder is an essential part of our cured glass manufacturing process. Unlike oil-based binders, ECOSE® Technology comes from a sustainable plant-based source, contains no added formaldehyde or phenols, and is 70% less energy-intensive to manufacture. We’re looking at other ways to make our manufacturing processes more efficient. We’ve partnered with Siemens to roll out an energy management programme and iin some of our manufacturing sites in the UK, which will reduce our carbon emissions by 7,000 tonnes a year.
Finally, we’re looking at our distribution processes. For example, we have the industry’s most advanced compression packaging which reduces volume from nine to one, so there is more product in each pack and fewer lorries on the road. We’re also using thinner film to reduce our plastic waste, and we’ve trimmed 2kg from our pallets, saving around 5,000 trees every year. BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net August 2019
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