Written by: Jessica Buckle and Tabitha Binding 

The Riverside Sunderland: University Design Challenge (#RSUDC21) and interactive webinar series continued with a focus on ‘Counting Carbon’ last Thursday night.

Presentations explored operational and embodied carbon, Lifecycle Assessments (LCA’s) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD’s), as well as Carbon Calculators as an essential tool; FCBS Carbon and PHribbon.

Sustainability Forum RIBA NE Co-Chair and Director of JDDK Architects, Adam Vaughan, while chairing the session, said sustainability can no longer be discussed in qualitative terms. Built environment professionals must be climate literate, and with clients becoming increasingly concerned with carbon emissions, it is being demanded by the market, including in the North East of the UK. This climate literacy will be essential if we are to reduce our carbon emissions by 7-8 percent per year until 2040, as is necessary to reach Net Zero.

To illustrate the scale of the challenge, LETI Volunteer and Associate at Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios (FCBS), Joe Jack Williams, highlighted that during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown in April, emissions dropped by around 17-18 percent. This was at a time when the global economy had effectively ground to a halt. To overcome the climate crisis we need to go beyond this reduction in carbon emissions – while it may appear intimidating, it is clearly achievable, Williams said.

Publications such as the Embodied Carbon Primer by the London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI) are providing the roadmaps which will support designers to reduce emissions; whether through low carbon substitutes for building materials, designing for future disassembly and deconstruction, building collaboratively to find optimum solutions, site analysis, constructing lightweight structures, carbon storage methods and designing multifunctional spaces.

One of the UK’s thought leaders on Life Cycle Analysis, Director of Construction LCA Ltd Jane Anderson, echoed this urgency. The slower we progress the more drastic actions will need to be in the future. Anderson explained the ‘Lock-in Effect’. While non-efficient buildings can be retrofitted to mitigate their future carbon impact, the emissions from material production are sunk emissions and cannot be recovered. You cannot remove a wall along with the related carbon emissions once it has been built. And as building become more energy efficient, embodied carbon is becoming a larger proportion of Whole Life Carbon emissions.

However, there are lots of ways to reduce embodied carbon. These emissions can often be reduced by 30-40% without incurring greater costs by simplifying the design, using lower carbon materials efficiently and reducing waste, Anderson said. Currently, there is no national legislation for embodied carbon in the UK. However, with a push from local authorities, including the Greater London Authority (GLA), who recently received permission to introduce a London Plan which considers embodied carbon, its importance will grow. UK designers and specifiers do have some tools to take on the challenge, but all tools are different, which can skew reporting. ACAN are lobbying to get a clear strategy and bring embodied carbon into building regulations.

However, more than 10,000 Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) to the European Standards exist for construction products, which can help designers and specifiers are able to find out all the impacts of the product over its life cycle. This huge milestone is enabling us to implement solutions to reduce embodied carbon, Anderson said (a list of relevant materials is available at the bottom of this article). The greatest opportunity to reduce embodied carbon is during planning and design, and designers should take up a mantra to ‘think, design, assess, review, reduce and repeat’ to reduce carbon. This included a focus to more building in timber, rather than put more timber in buildings – timber always needs to be used efficiently and sustainably.

Following on from this presentation, Joe Jack Williams returned to run through FCBS’ carbon approach and route to zero carbon projects by 2025. He said the key is to understand where carbon manifests itself within our buildings, and the huge impact our decisions can have. Building an accurate Whole Life Carbon Model requires a detailed bill of materials and FCBS have developed a tool to record project details, estimate whole life timeframes of their projects and crucially, understand how our buildings emit carbon. Making sustainable design decisions or amendments within the early stages of a project, between RIBA stages 0 and 2, enable more influential decisions to be made without negative repercussions, whether cost or inconvenience for a client. Alterations become progressively more difficult if made later within the design-build process.

Passivhaus Designer, Chartered Arch Technologist and Retrofit Coordinator at Phribbon, Tim Martel talked and ran through two calculators that he has been instrumental in designing – PHribbon which is a plug in to PassivHaus’s essential design tool PHPP. He went on to talk about a new standalone calculator to be hosted by AECB, available at a very reasonable price, and is easily custom-able – ideal for individual designers or small practices.

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