Digital Construction Week – which took place at the same time and location as the Facilities Show – provided an interesting perspective on the construction sector’s own Scope 3 emissions challenges.
A panel session on Thursday 18th May touched on the current situation whereby there is inconsistent transaction-level data for the carbon emissions involved in the production of products up and down the construction supply chain. Contractors are overly reliant on ‘generic carbon calculators’ to measure their Scope 3 emissions.
Addressing the issue, software provider Causeway Technologies is in the throes of developing a system for contractors and suppliers to replace such calculators.
Graham Edgell, group procurement director with Morgan Sindall Group, spoke in favour of the initiative. “The industry has to move on and use a rifle rather than a blunderbuss,” he said. ”We need a common language so that we can produce reliable evidence and an audit trail.”
Increasingly, the problem will be in the requirement to produce accurate carbon calculations for projects upfront, in some cases before suppliers are even on board on a construction project. And in all of it, the cost of all the necessary oversight will be the main problem.
“We’re a 2% industry,” said Morgan Sindall’s Edgell. “The bureaucracy we need to put in place is almost impossible to deliver.”
Paul Wagstaff of Aggregate Industries concurred while Jack Waring, sustainability manager at Balfour Beatty, said that the firm was getting more requests from its tier 1 contractors asking about the entire “plot to handover” embedded carbon.
“We’ve been giving averages for that,” said Wagstaff, “but we realised that that approach needed work. So now, every single material we have has been given a carbon value, also working out the carbon entailed in our production sites.”
The need for granular detail, sometimes literally that, was the order of the day. Wagstaff mentioned the difference in embodied carbon between different forms of cement, emissions being dependent on the type of blend and manufacture. “That’s where we need to go to be that granular.”
Edgell said it was important for construction to appreciate the sheer scale of construction’s Scope 3 issue.
“Scope 1 and 2 is just 3% of the problem,” he said. “Scope 3 is where the problem is. Without this, you don’t have a place to start. There are 40-odd carbon calculators currently used in construction but not many of them are any good.”
Waring appreciated that tier 1 construction contractors could see the issue as “incredibly complex”. However, he added, “if you look at it [and calculate it] at each step of the way, it could become relatively simple” [to collate].
Causeway’s project to provide a scalable solution that delivers verifiable data to measure Scope 3 emissions ‘in real time’ has been under development for 18 months, with the support of constructors Aggregate Industries, Balfour Beatty, Morgan Sindall, and Galliford Try.
