BUILDINGS, MAINTENANCE & REFURBISHMENT Get ready for embodied carbon
Education Today hears from RICHARD AYLEN, Technical Manager at Junckers.
in an informed way if you understand embodied carbon issues.
Until now it was almost unheard of for a client to impose strict limits on embodied carbon, but this is changing. In Scotland the Scottish Futures scheme for school building includes an upper limit for embodied carbon of 600kg per square metre of floor area. Later this year, in their 2025 Output Specification for new school buildings, England’s Department for Education (DfE) will impose a maximum limit of 550kg of embodied carbon per square metre of floor area.
T
he way a product or material affects global warming is usually measured by the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are generated during its lifetime. For many years the construction industry has been trying to reduce its effect upon global warming. We use phrases such as ‘net zero carbon’ and ‘carbon neutral’, so before we go further, let’s look at what these terms mean.
A person, company or country is carbon neutral if they balance the carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere through their everyday activities with the amount they absorb or remove from the atmosphere. This is also called net zero carbon emissions or net zero carbon, because overall no carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. Broadly speaking, there are two main categories of carbon. The first is operational carbon, which is related to energy used for heating, lighting etc. We have already made some useful gains in reducing operational carbon through using renewable energy and heating our buildings more efficiently. It is becoming harder to find new ways of reducing operational carbon, so attention is being directed towards reducing embodied carbon. This is the carbon generated by or contained in a product, and if this is known you can measure the greenhouse gases generated, and therefore the product’s effect upon global warming.
Many raw materials contain an element of embodied carbon, and greenhouse gas emissions arise when construction products are manufactured, transported, installed and disposed of.
If your role in your school allows you to influence the choice of materials used in your buildings, then having an understanding of embodied carbon allows you to know what effect you are having upon global warming. Architects and other building designers are increasingly being asked to provide embodied carbon data, so as a client you will be able to brief your designer
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www.education-today.co.uk September 2025
The DfE will also require biogenic carbon levels to be reported. This is a type of embodied carbon that is locked up in the fabric of the material by biological processes, best illustrated by the way trees collect carbon as they grow. Carbon is stored in the wood itself until it is burned or it decomposes. By reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere trees help to reduce global warming. If you have solid wooden floors, which have very long life spans, you will be “locking up” carbon for the life of the floor. This cycle of lifetime carbon collection (also known as sequestration) and release does not increase the total amount of carbon in the environment, and this is why timber is often referred to as a carbon neutral material.
This is quite different from the way carbon is bound up in plastics and other crude oil derived materials, such as synthetic textile and sheet floor coverings. Use of crude oil derived carbon products ultimately increases global warming because when they are disposed of carbon is released into the atmosphere that would
otherwise have remained locked underground, resulting in a net increase in global warming. This is precisely why we are turning away from fossil derived energy sources such as coal and gas. If you want to find out how much embodied carbon a product or material contains, and its effect on global warming, the best information source is an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). An EPD is a lifetime assessment, from raw materials, manufacturing, to final disposal or recycling. This last factor is one which makes solid hardwood floors attractive to sustainable building designers because they can be refurbished many times over, can often be repurposed and have a long service life.
The UK construction industry is starting to favour re-using older buildings, rather than new builds. Most of the embodied carbon in a building is contained in its structure and foundations, so it makes little sense to demolish and dispose of the existing structure, only to replace it with new. If you do this, you are releasing the embodied carbon from the old building (bad for global warming!) and then replacing it with new concrete and steel which creates yet more embodied carbon.
At the present time we are seeing strong trends towards measurement of carbon for both new build and refurbishment projects. Anyone who is involved with construction or estate management will benefit from keeping abreast of this increasingly hot topic, as this will help us to face the global warming challenges that lie ahead.
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