COP26 - 03/11/21

By Hannah Beirne

I’ve been carrying out embodied carbon analysis for more than 5 years now, so I was intrigued going into events surrounding the impact of construction on the climate. Other companies in the building services industry have been very vocal on how they’ve reduced carbon footprints in real-life projects, and I also had a number of discussions with those attending on how we’ve managed to achieve the same feat in many of our own projects.

Dr Jannik Giesekam gave a talk on the lack of nationwide regulations around construction and spoke of the proposals for Part Z of the building regulations, which would require all major building projects to carry out Whole Life Carbon Assessments, with a view to setting carbon limits in the future. With in-use emissions reducing year on year, carbon of the construction and demolition processes is becoming more and more important, and CPW fully supports the call for Part Z. In fact, a recent industrial project we were involved with was designed with embodied carbon at the top of the agenda. As such, 98% of materials on the pre-existing site, equating to almost 40,000 tonnes of metal and aggregate, were recycled and used in the new development. Steel salvaged from the frame of the old buildings was used in the new buildings, and concrete was retained on site for various uses, making massive reductions on embodied carbon.

In the evening I attended the ‘Construction Collage’ workshop. Devised in France, this exercise is a collaborative exploration of how the built environment affects the world around us. As a group event I found it great to share my knowledge on material choice in construction and how that impacts carbon emissions, and listen to the invaluable expertise of my peers on the matter, in particular eluding to topics such as construction and biodiversity. All in all, it was a really enjoyable experience that helped myself and the other attendees to understand the impacts of our choices on the natural world.

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Experts give talks on Embodied Carbon

The Construction Collage Workshop