Material choice in construction is increasingly being influenced by data, particularly when it comes to assessing environmental performance.
Tackling the environmental and delivery challenges facing the built environment will require project teams to go beyond business as usual and adopt innovative approaches rather than relying on what has typically worked in the past.
Data has an important role to play in giving project teams the confidence to embrace new ideas and materials.
This trend is only likely to accelerate as digital design tools become more sophisticated and artificial intelligence becomes embedded within the design process. AI can help analyse vast quantities of information and identify design solutions more quickly, but its recommendations will only ever be as good as the data it is trained on. Better decisions depend on better information, making access to robust environmental data more important than ever.
However, this presents two significant challenges for materials suppliers, designers and sustainability professionals: the availability of data and the quality of data.
The first challenge is ensuring that the data needed to make informed assessments exists in the first place. The UK concrete industry recognises the importance of improving transparency and is committed to sharing data on its greenhouse gas emissions as it transitions towards net zero, as set out in the UK Concrete Industry Sustainable Construction Strategy Framework.
The recent publication of the UK Concrete Sustainability Data Report 2024 demonstrates that commitment in action. This is the latest publication of industry performance across a wide range of environmental performance metrics, dating back to 2009. Collecting and reporting this data helps communicate the progress the industry is making and drives better practice within the sector itself.
For example, from this report we can see that the average carbon intensity of concrete has reduced by over 30% since the 1990 baseline. However, it is not granular enough to support project teams seeking to make informed decisions about material selection and embodied carbon, as it does not describe the performance of any one product and cannot be used as a basis for comparison.
This is where the second challenge on ensuring that the data used to make decisions is accurate, representative and robust comes into play. Decisions based on unrepresentative, incomplete or poor-quality information could hamper the built environment’s progress towards net zero.
As a result, independently verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) are growing in importance. These standardised data sets describe the environmental impacts of a product over its full life cycle and therefore allow project teams to more easily compare the impacts of different construction materials.
Supporting that commitment to measure and disclose carbon data, the UK concrete sector has been producing EPDs for a wide range of products for over 10 years, with almost all product groups now covered including ready-mixed concrete, masonry concrete blocks, precast concrete flooring and precast concrete cladding and sandwich panels. The Concrete Centre has recently produced a factsheet which summarises this information, making it more easily accessible.
That being said, data is only valuable if it can be used effectively. The data within EPDs is most effectively used when it is part of a whole life carbon assessment of a building or infrastructure asset. There must be a concerted effort across the built environment to provide project teams with the tools and skills needed to use and interpret the data correctly.
Initiatives such as Future Homes Hub’s Future Homes Carbon Assessment Tool, which draws on a wide range of data, including the third party verified EPDs supplied by the concrete sector, will play an important role in equipping housebuilders with the information needed to make informed decisions on embodied carbon for the next generation of homes.
As careful consideration of carbon becomes more standard across all new developments, there is an increased need for more sophisticated and holistic analysis of environmental data that compares the impacts of different construction materials across building lifecycles.
The concrete sector is delivering on its commitment to measure and disclose greenhouse gas emissions associated with production, both as a sector, but also through EPDs for specific products, giving project teams the confidence to make decisions that genuinely support a more sustainable built environment.
Andrea Charlson, Head of Sustainability
UK Concrete and The Concrete Centre