Webinar on what is embodied carbon, how it is relevant to existing buildings and what the UK needs to do about reducing it.

00:00:01:06 - 00:00:19:13
Speaker 1
Thank you Matt and thank you for your helpful orientation. And thank you all for coming today. Just to reiterate Matt’s comments, please do put your questions in the chat as we have plenty of time at the end to discuss these. My name is Alison Church. I'm going to be chairing today's presentation. I'm a chartered structural engineer, a member of the IStructE

00:00:20:02 - 00:00:42:08
Speaker 1
That's the Institute of Stuctural Engineers. And I'm also the chair of the Institute's Small Practitioners Panel. I am a senior structure engineer at Historic England and I also work in the Climate Change Adaptation Team. And today I have my colleague Ella Seed to help out as well. Before we start, I'd like to give you a quick introduction to our structural engineers at Historic England.

00:00:42:12 - 00:01:04:10
Speaker 1
We are a nine strong national team with over 200 years of combined experience in working with historic buildings. We have specialists within our team, including a care panel member, a number of drone pilots, and we also have access to special surveying equipment. As a team, we provide structural engineering services to English Heritage Trust and specialist advice and assistance to our regional teams.

00:01:05:10 - 00:01:27:06
Speaker 1
Our talk today is going to give you an introduction and refresher on what embodied carbon is, why it is important and how it is relevant to existing buildings. Followed by an update on where we are as an industry now. And then we will have time for questions afterwards. And without further ado, I am delighted to introduce you to Will Arnold, head of Climate Action at the Institute of Structural Engineers.

00:01:27:15 - 00:01:38:04
Speaker 1
Will has worked for Arup as a practicing engineer for ten years prior to his current role within the Institute and is an expert in his field. Welcome, Will.

00:01:39:04 - 00:01:59:01
Speaker 2
Thanks, Alison. And thank you, everyone, for giving up part of your day to come and hear me speak. I hope that I can make it worthwhile, since quite a lot of you online, which is quite daunting. But it's it's nice to see actually a couple of familiar faces in the participants list. So hello again. For those of you who I know and who likes the first time, those who I don't.

00:02:00:00 - 00:02:32:16
Speaker 2
So as Alison said, I'm going to be talking about embodied carbon today almost exclusively although I’ll sort of touch on the relationship between it and some other things. As we go through slide deck and I'm coming at this as a sort of caveat before we start, I'm coming at this primarily from the view of structural engineering and as a structural engineer by training, I spent ten years at Arup. My formative years was spent designing buildings kind of like the one you see on the, the background of our generic slide deck on the screen in front of you now.

00:02:33:10 - 00:02:54:09
Speaker 2
So my primary interests and knowledge are in the use of steel, concrete, timber and brick primarily for new buildings. So actually speaking about existing buildings is something of great interest to me, but something that stretches me a bit outside my own comfort zone. So it was nice to have the opportunity to sort of learn a bit more about that in preparing for today's webinar.

00:02:56:01 - 00:03:25:06
Speaker 2
Right, let's let's start with basic overview. So apologies to those of you who know a bit about embodied carbon already, but I found it's useful to start by just making sure we're all on the same page as each other. So what is embodied carbon? We if you think of a building, there are two aspects. So what that building does is there's the sort of physical side of it all the things that you could touch, the floors that you can walk on, the windows that you can open and close and so on.

00:03:25:15 - 00:03:56:16
Speaker 2
And then there's the the sort of energy based side of it. So you can turn the lights on and off, turn the air conditioning on and off, run a tap, so on and so forth. Those energy side of things, that's the operational side of things that creates what we call operational carbon. And all the things that you can touch on has something called embodied carbon relates to I think the word embodied comes to the fact that those materials are the sort of embodiment of those emissions. Those embodied carbon emissions,

00:03:56:16 - 00:04:23:16
Speaker 2
they cover everything that led to that material being where it is today infront of you. So think of the chair that you sat on. For example, some materials had to be mined or put on the ground or maybe chopped down if you had a wooden chair that then had to be turned into a product. Now to be driven to sites, probably unless just us on a barge right now and maybe it was floated site and over its lifespan you will need to maintain this thing.

00:04:24:00 - 00:04:41:05
Speaker 2
And it might be as simple as putting some oils in some gears or something, or it could be as much as needing to refurbish the chair over time and eventually it will reach the end of its life. And at that point in time, somebody will need to either demolish it, take it away, deconstruct, recycle it, something will happen to it.

00:04:41:09 - 00:05:17:15
Speaker 2
All of those steps have greenhouse gas emissions associated with them, and we lump all of those together and we call that embodied carbon. And as a general rule of thumb from all those things, I just sort of went through about 80% of the carbon in embodied carbon just comes from getting hold of those materials in the first place. And the other 20% is that transportation installation, that kind of stuff that even with maintenance, if you if you re coat a chair, 80% of the emissions due to that maintenance are coming from getting those new coatings, whatever that might be, giving you the tail.

00:05:17:15 - 00:05:39:04
Speaker 2
So when we talk about body carbon with mostly talking about extraction of resources out of the ground and turning it into products. And then there's a bit more to do with transport and installation and operational carbon. I suppose everything else in buildings, you can turn it off, turn it off. I'm not going to go into depth on this slide because a lot of you probably never really have to deal with this.

00:05:39:04 - 00:06:03:14
Speaker 2
But this is just to say there is a methodology and a sort of reporting nomenclature around all of this. There's lots of different words. I ‘ve just introduced whole life carbon on the previous slide. That's the combination of embodied plus operational. And if you could zoom in on this, you'd also see that that's something called up front carbon, which is basically embodied carbon that gets emitted at the start of a project's life.

00:06:03:14 - 00:06:28:13
Speaker 2
So that's up to the point where one of the keys for new the link or in the case of a refurbishment project, the point where you sort of you have handover practical completion of that refurbishment, you give it back to clients so they can move back in. That has this up front carbon term with it and there's also a bunch of stuff to do with the circular economy that's referred to as module D sometimes, and that's to do with potential savings in carbon further down the life of a building.

00:06:29:06 - 00:06:54:12
Speaker 2
But I won't be going into that today. So the next question, once you understand what embodied carbon is, is like how how does this sit in among this sort of big picture of the world's emissions? How important is this as a topic? And many of you will be aware or very I hope that buildings and construction contribute to nearly 40% of energy related carbon emissions.

00:06:54:12 - 00:07:20:17
Speaker 2
So 37% as of 2021, I think of global emissions that use of buildings and construction and you'll notice that then there is other big chunks on here due to something called other construction industry, which I've never been quite sure what that includes, but also transportation and a big part of transportation is moving construction materials about. In the UK I think embodied sorry in the UK total emissions

00:07:20:17 - 00:07:42:01
Speaker 2
of buildings and construction, including transports of materials and stuff like that, I think it comes to about 40% of the UK's emissions, so it's slightly less than what you'd see on this global graph for this on this globe graph put aside, you've got transports of materials on top of buildings and such. And on top of that the construction industry, you can see you’re over half. The UK, it's a bit lower.

00:07:42:01 - 00:08:03:05
Speaker 2
That's just because we fly more, we eat more beef, we drive cars more, all that sort of stuff. And we did all of that. When you to look for which bits of this make of embodied carbon, you find out the global emissions. Some somewhere in the proportion of 10 or 15% of those is due to embodied carbon. So it's a pretty significant chunk on this graph.

00:08:03:08 - 00:08:21:15
Speaker 2
Again in the UK it's a bit lower, I think it's about seven or 8% in the UK, but it's still significant and if you can see it when he puts it on the pie charts and it's significantly more than things like aviation or shipping, which often get quite a lot of press of this. So significance and it's not really talked about.

00:08:24:03 - 00:08:43:10
Speaker 2
We should put this against some numbers for sort of scales. So I like to think of things in terms of how many London to New York flights are they. I always talk in terms of economy class tickets because I'm an engineer. But a London to New York economy class, one way ticket that's about one tonne of carbon gets emitted when you purchase that ticket for that.

00:08:43:10 - 00:09:11:13
Speaker 2
See some upside for comparison. My understanding of the works that went on at Battersea Power Station just within the station itself, so not all the other buildings that went up was at about 100,000 tons of carbon will have been emitted during that works now. It's a pretty unique example. I mean it's huge. And frankly, the work that had to go into this was this almost site was creating a new building, but it gives you a sort of order of magnitude for how high these numbers can go in the built environment.

00:09:12:01 - 00:09:34:14
Speaker 2
And the point of this is that if that project had been 1% lower carbon, then that would have been a saving made in the order of magnitude of a thousand tonnes of carbon. And so you see that when we talk about, you know, skipping flying and taking a cut to Starbucks and not eating meat. These are all really important things to do anyway if you want to drive down your personal carbon emissions.

00:09:35:01 - 00:10:00:03
Speaker 2
But if you are involved in the built environment, in the building industry, or you're involved in construction, or you are a planner or you are and a client on a new project, so even you are getting extension puts on your own home the order of magnitude of those emissions will always be greater than the order of magnitude of the emissions savings that are presented by whether we take our own cup to Starbucks or not, whether we get on that flight.

00:10:00:03 - 00:10:23:09
Speaker 2
So this is not to say don't worry about your flying emissions. Please do worry about that very much. Obviously, the point is that even more than that, we need to worry about the emissions through our work. That's an overview of what embodied carbon is and that's a bit of a glimpse into sort of why people like me care so much about this and talk about this so often.

00:10:24:01 - 00:10:39:05
Speaker 2
The next step, of course, is then to understand how we go about looking at this. So there's going to be a couple of equations on the screen. Apologies if you're not on equations type person or you haven't had a coffee with your lunch, they'll be over before you know it. But I think it's important to put this out there so you can sort of see how this goes together.

00:10:39:14 - 00:11:12:03
Speaker 2
The good news is that it's about as simple as it gets in calculation terms. So the basics of calculating embodied carbon are as follows. You need to know the quantity of stuff that you've got, and you need to know something called the carbon factor for that stuff. And if you multiply those together, you get embodied carbon. So as an example, if you're building a brick wall at the bottom of your garden, you need to know how many bricks you're going to buy and you need to know the carbon factor per brick and you've got a thousand bricks.

00:11:12:03 - 00:11:29:09
Speaker 2
So you multiply that carbon factor by a thousand and that produces the total. You probably also got some mortar going in there. So again, you need to know how much more so is it. Maybe that's measured in kilograms. What's the carbon factor in kilograms of carbon per kilogram of mortar? Multiply together, add that up to the total repeats of the foundations and so on.

00:11:29:17 - 00:11:52:15
Speaker 2
And it's as simple as this really. There's, there's a few nuanced bits. So transportation emissions is slightly different. On site, construction emissions due to using cranes and coops and things are that's a bit different again. But as I mentioned at the start, most of the emissions in embodied carbon come from that use of materials in the first place.

00:11:52:15 - 00:12:10:10
Speaker 2
It's sort of 80% of the problem and that 80% is all calculated like that. So if you can do this, it's you get most of the way to the answer and that means you can do it pretty quickly. That means you can compare options and things like that. So we'll come back in a minute. A couple of notes.

00:12:10:10 - 00:12:28:16
Speaker 2
The quantity, obviously, the quality of that quantity is going to depend on the design stage. If somebody says, I want to put a wall at the bottom of my garden or I need to underpin this building or I need to repair these windows. You might do a very rough calculation quickly to work out how much would you need for the windows or how much concrete you going to need to underpin it.

00:12:29:02 - 00:12:43:07
Speaker 2
And it won't be till later on in the design process that you'll know those quantities with a bit more certainty. But it doesn't stop you from calculating this. You can calculate at any point. You just have to sort of log what that uncertainty is, keep it in the back of your mind. It's the same as a cost plan.

00:12:43:15 - 00:13:06:00
Speaker 2
We don't really know how much this restoration was going to cost, but we think it will be in the order of magnitude of X. And as we progress the project further, we will narrow that down. The notes of the complex on the right hand side says For each life cycle module, that's just referring to that big, complicated graphic I showed you with all the squares and different colors and all the different lifecycle modules in there.

00:13:06:00 - 00:13:26:02
Speaker 2
So you can repeat this for different bits if you wanted to look at just the sort of production emissions due to mining out the ground, you could look at just that module. Generally speaking, you can get the carbon factor for most of the up front Carbon all sort of sits in one place. We can go into that in more depth in the QA if people would like.

00:13:26:02 - 00:13:44:17
Speaker 2
So let's go in step. But you get the gist of it now and that's important. This is a slide about something else. This is dated just to say, look, there's lots of ways you can go about to those quantities. But the really important thing with this is not to be put off from calculating it just because of uncertainty.

00:13:44:17 - 00:14:12:10
Speaker 2
Like I said, you can calculate this early on based on rules of thumb, on quantities and so on. Please do do that, because if you do that, then you at least know kind of where you are order of magnitude and that uncertainty will decrease over the course of time. On the carbon factor side, it's worth flagging that there's sort of a couple of there's a couple of things you can do to look at carbon factors.

00:14:12:10 - 00:14:37:14
Speaker 2
So there is so-called generic data out there. So that would be things like an average carbon factor for materials. So there's a timber beam on the screen in this in this image, there is generic average factors. You can use timber. The IStructE publishes a list of some of these. I'll show you that's on the next slide. And there are other or the database you can go to as well.

00:14:37:14 - 00:14:55:01
Speaker 2
So you could have a generic number for timber. I used to when I first started getting interested in this topic, I used to have a few numbers in the back of my notebook and it would say things like, you know, timber, the carbon factor is about 0.2. So for every kilogram of timber I use, I miss about 0.2 kilograms of carbon.

00:14:56:00 - 00:15:20:16
Speaker 2
The fact of the concrete is 0.1 factor for steel is between 0.5 and 2.5 depending when it comes from. Those are all sort of generic data. The other type of carbon factors, products data, and this is specific factors that have been calculated for something that you've gone out and bought. So more and more manufacturers now are producing these things that are called environmental product declarations.

00:15:20:16 - 00:15:42:12
Speaker 2
EPDs and that's basically a data sheet with all of the environmental impacts on it's of that material. And so you can pick these up now for windows, doors, for door handles, but you can also get them from materials, whether it's some CE 24 timber, whether it's concrete, whether it's a a UK wide supply with concrete, who's got product data.

00:15:42:12 - 00:16:16:00
Speaker 2
That's the sort of average across everything they sell or somebody who's got a very specific but a product data for one concrete mix. So they sell. A lot of this stuff exists and the number of these data sheets has been going up exponentially over the last ten or 20 years. I always forget where the number is about these days, but you can do a quick Google flick that's really good websites out there to track this stuff and it's only going to go in this direction because people want to see lower carbon products and the way to prove your products is lower carbon is to get one of these data sheets produced for it.

00:16:16:00 - 00:16:39:10
Speaker 2
The generic data should always be used as the defaults. When you do these calculations until such time that you have got your specific products bought. Now, I always say bought because I always say once money has exchange hands, you're definitely going to receive that products. A lot of people will say something like want you specified to project the product.

00:16:40:05 - 00:17:02:05
Speaker 2
It's okay to update your tax collection, to use that use up. That's the reason why I say bought is because once money has changed hands, generally speaking, you to get that. The risk of using product data too early in these calculations is that you that actually are buying a different product because the one you wanted wasn't available and the carbon factors are different again and that's the carbon footprint is differnet to what you thought it would be.

00:17:02:12 - 00:17:25:14
Speaker 2
You can stay on top of that, of course, but it's a watch that you can avoid if you wait until that slightly later time before switching to use that data. Now, if you weren't paying attention to the math and that all opens over your head and you just think that sounds like too much work, the really good news is there's loads of guidance out there and there's loads of tools out there that do this sort of stuff for you.

00:17:25:14 - 00:17:52:16
Speaker 2
And also it's free. So the Institution of Stuctural Engineers published a guide called ‘How to calculate embodied carbon’. The first edition was published I think in 2020, and the second edition was published at the start of last year. So we had to update it pretty quickly because this is an area that's moving quite fast, that's completely free. If you go to our website or you Google the title of that guide, it will come up pretty quickly.

00:17:52:16 - 00:18:09:04
Speaker 2
We also then created something that we call the ‘structural carbon tool’, which is basically just an Excel spreadsheet, but it does what it says in the guide. So the two things go together. The beauty of the tool is that you can just have it on your laptop and you can throw some material quantities into it. Does all of the math for you.

00:18:10:05 - 00:18:29:16
Speaker 2
Again, that's completely free. If you want it, just go on the websites of Google it. With both of these I think you have to create a user accounts on our websites which which is free. The reason why we ask people to do that is just because that way when you've downloaded it, we then come to updates it. You get an automated email saying we've updated it.

00:18:29:16 - 00:18:48:05
Speaker 2
Please get hold of the latest version of this. This is a topic that's moving relatively fast compared to lots of other things in the building industry. So it's worth making sure you got the latest version of these. We're planning on starting the writing of the third edition of The Guide at the start of next year. No promises as to when that means it will be finished.

00:18:48:11 - 00:19:06:09
Speaker 2
We're going to start right at the beginning and the tool will be updated at the same time. As worth saying, on top of those things, and this is just a slide that shows you basically what the tool looks like to prove that it's not too scary. You've got material, material type specification. All of those are just dropdown lists.

00:19:06:15 - 00:19:34:09
Speaker 2
So, you know, if you're going to do some underpinning, you want some concrete, you would click concrete in the first column. Then under the material type, you probably click in situ concrete specification. It would give you a list of possible strengths. You pick something typical rolling up one of your engineering friends and say, What's typical here? And then you basically then just pop in how much of the stuff it is, either in kilograms of mass or in cubic meters of volume, and it does the rest for you.

00:19:34:10 - 00:19:55:10
Speaker 2
It adds everything else up for you and it gives you some numbers down at the bottom. So you have how this works out in total tonnes of carbon. And it also has a little comparison thing that tells you how many economy class flights to New York you you will be responsible for. So you can use this stuff to make those calculations happen quite quickly and.

00:19:55:17 - 00:20:27:01
Speaker 2
Oh yeah, and that's just a reminder that it's the same as that equation I showed you early on. The important thing with all of this, and I’ll stress this again and again, is that there's no point just doing these calculations for the sake of doing them. I don't even think there's a huge amount of point of doing it from a sort of benchmarking points of view, because actually in terms of setting benchmarks and carbon targets and things like that, we're more interested in calculating the final actual emissions on our projects than we are just seeing them at design stage.

00:20:27:01 - 00:20:48:03
Speaker 2
And the reason to do these calculations is purely down to making sure that you pick a lower carbon solution. So the reason to do this is to understand is, option A, higher or lower carbon than option B, and what's the difference? This is about enabling you to make quantitative decisions between options, between whether or not to intervene about things.

00:20:49:09 - 00:21:05:00
Speaker 2
And that means that if you can do the numbers, that a good enough level of accuracy to let you do that, to make the right decision, then that's good enough. And that's why I'm keen to highlight that 80% of this is in the materials rather than the transports and things like that, because that's where the bulk of your effort should be.

00:21:05:00 - 00:21:38:02
Speaker 2
So you can make those decisions. The last thing that I'd stress, and this is a really specific for reuse projects, is that because those emissions are all related to the extraction of new materials and the creation of new stuff, new things, it's only those new things that you need to go about calculating the emissions of. So if you've got a project that in section looks a bit like this where there's strengthening at the ground floor of an existing structure, the existing structures in incredible white and purple is new.

00:21:38:06 - 00:22:11:00
Speaker 2
So there’s some strengthening at the ground ground floor, there’s an extension of the back. Maybe it's a lobby space or something like that. There's some alterations where you've made a few openings. Maybe there's a rooftop extension if it's a certain type of project. I appreciate you can't do a lot of this, but a lot of listed buildings. But just to give you sort of overview. All of those extra bits, all of that new stuff, you need to calculate the carbon footprint of it. The embodied carbon of it. All of that stuff that's existed for anywhere between one year and a thousand years.

00:22:12:03 - 00:22:39:11
Speaker 2
The emissions related to that already happens there in the past. So there's actually no need to calculate those for today. And when we talk about looking at the carbon savings of reusing existing building versus building a new one, what we're actually talking about is we’re working out the carbon emissions due to building a new one, and we then say that we've avoided that and maybe there's a bit of emissions based on strengthening or so on.

00:22:39:11 - 00:23:02:11
Speaker 2
So you take one from the other. But that that's what we talk about having saved. We're not saying this is what the emissions were when this 18th century palace was built and therefore that’s our savings. That's kind of nonsensical and not that useful. And so to some of you, that makes perfect sense. You might be wondering why I'm saying this, but this is a really, really common question and it's an avenue

00:23:02:11 - 00:23:25:02
Speaker 2
people quite often get stuck going down. So just sort of putting that out there. Now the rule of thumb is that if that's something new coming to sites, you need to calculate the embodied carbon emissions of it. If it's already there, you can just leave it alone. Okay. A few slides on specific issues around existing buildings that the sort of new build crowds don't have to do with.

00:23:25:17 - 00:23:47:00
Speaker 2
The first has to do with the policy materials that you use. I think it's fair to say that. I mean, firstly, embodied carbon is a fairly new subject for a lot of people. It's evolving quite quickly, but actually most of the conversations that are being had are mostly embodied carbon data out there are based around the materials that are used most typically for new buildings.

00:23:47:00 - 00:24:17:04
Speaker 2
So that's virgin timber, new brickwork, new steel, new concrete and so on. And there's a lot less understanding about the emissions due to new lime renders, hardwood that you're going to use to do some framing, repair mortars for foundations, stuff like that. It's all relatively niche, you work in an interesting niche parts of the industry, but that means that that material data and therefore those embodied carbon factors can be a lot harder to come by.

00:24:17:11 - 00:24:50:14
Speaker 2
Doesn't mean don't do it and look into it. But this is just a really key watch it is that it's if you want to go down this route and look at carbon, you might need to start assembling your own sort of list of typical materials in your part of the world and try and start putting some numbers to those. We don't have long renders in the House Calculating Body Carbon Guide, for example, there might be some numbers out that I, I don't know I haven't actually at themselves. The second of the sort of three things to flag is that I think existing buildings have a lot more to think about in terms of dealing with

00:24:50:14 - 00:25:19:04
Speaker 2
the symptoms of climate change as well as the cause of it. So you've got these buildings that are going to have to deal with excess flooding above and beyond anything they've ever seen in their life, no matter how long they’ve stood there for. You've got these projects that have dealt with the loss of settlements and ground movements already, but potentially going to have more to come as we find, you know, a levels of flash flooding followed by drought, followed by flash flooding, doing weird and more extreme things to ground conditions that we're used to.

00:25:20:05 - 00:25:38:09
Speaker 2
And you're going to see more and more storm loading and wind loading that we've seen in the past. I live in a an 18th century grade two listed little townhouse up near Milton Keynes. And when we bought it and we moved into the bedroom in the attic, and then my wife saying, are you sure, you sure this is safe?

00:25:38:16 - 00:25:56:16
Speaker 2
Because all of the roof beams are pretty bendy. So you can you can see a really nice deflection them and I always said then yeah, fine. It's been here for a couple of hundred years, it's had everything sort of thrown at it. But actually when, when you're in that during a storm and you work with climate change, you do start to wonder how much worse is it going to get?

00:25:57:04 - 00:26:20:05
Speaker 2
And when I speak to specialists who understand the intricacies of wind loading, for the most part, they're telling me nobody really knows where the wind loads are going to increase by a small amount or a big amount. And so most of their advice is based around enabling people to come back and strengthen things later on. If we find things getting much worse, they're not generally advocating

00:26:20:11 - 00:26:44:07
Speaker 2
you need to design anything to be twice as strong today because no one has proved they need to be able to do that. But the point of those sort of examples is that if you're working with existing buildings and particularly heritage buildings, where doing this stuff can be a lot more difficult, you've got to deal with this sort of adoption and resilience side because you have to be able to deal with flooding and movement of wind loads and so on.

00:26:45:01 - 00:27:00:15
Speaker 2
But we cannot do that by itself. That can't just be a sort of siloed approach. We have to look at this alongside sustainability and mitigation, and we have to get the balance right between the two. I think that's a really important point. You can't just put your blinkers on and look at one of these or the other.

00:27:00:16 - 00:27:35:13
Speaker 2
You have to do both of. And the final the final issue is to do a sort of timeliness of all of this. So this is a slide that I use a lot when I give these sorts of presentations to people who work on new buildings. And I'm often really keen to point out that the embodied carbon emissions, which is shown on this graphic purple involve this big, big blob of emissions right at the start, the project, because you're building something new and your operational emissions are the gray things and they're relatively small per year and that's why we need to tackle embodied and so on and so forth. On a retrofit project

00:27:35:13 - 00:28:01:17
Speaker 2
it doesn't quite look the same and you might actually, your embodied carbon emissions in a year due to some light touch retrofit may be the same order of magnitude as you have operational emissions in the same year from burning gas in the gas boilers. So if you think of it, if I take my own home, I know that we're responsible for about two or three tonnes of emissions through to our heating and electricity per year.

00:28:03:00 - 00:28:19:13
Speaker 2
And so if I was to do, you know, I could imagine doing two tonnes of emissions worth of work on it if I was just going to do some light touch insulation, draft exclusion, secondary glazing and a few bits and bobs like that, you could see that being the same sort of order of magnitude. You end up with a graph like this.

00:28:20:05 - 00:28:42:16
Speaker 2
So on that project you're looking at embodied carbon and operational energy being in the same order of magnitude. On a different project, you might be doing something a lot more intensive from the embodied carbon point of view, because you need to underpin the thing. There’s some really, really you know, horrible stuff going on with maybe all the windows, all the windows need reworking from scratch using the same materials we always did.

00:28:43:03 - 00:29:03:01
Speaker 2
But you can't keep the existing ones. You have to use new, new timber. These sorts of decisions give you this balance of embodied and operational carbon. And this is the reasons to be able to calculate this stuff because you have to get the balance right. And when it comes to reducing body carbon, you know, the biggest part this really is getting those balances right.

00:29:03:06 - 00:29:26:11
Speaker 2
So particularly for existing buildings, you need those carbon factors that works with your policy materials and then you need the right balance of embodied and operational in and the right balance of mitigation versus reduction. And last, last few bits then in terms of sort of reducing it, there's not a huge amount say to you all for this could actually work in a part of the industry that's very efficient on its use materials for the most parts.

00:29:26:15 - 00:29:59:05
Speaker 2
What I typically go around telling people is that the most direct relationship between embodied carbon emissions and things they can do comes from them using materials more efficiently, use less stuff is kind of a mantra of mine in this. There's there's very little you can actually do by specifying one materials over a different version the same material. So if you've got two suppliers selling you cement or one of them thinks of theirs as a lot lower carbon than the other ones, it’s quite often not as not as clear cut as that, but if you use twice as many beams as you need, you will emit twice as much carbon as you need.

00:29:59:13 - 00:30:20:01
Speaker 2
So there's a big thing here about efficiency. And for most engineers and architects, what I'm therefore trying to tell them to do is reuse what they've already got. We use those existing assets. You already work in that world, so I don't need to tell you that. But this is just to give you that context and also, I guess to say that this is you know, this is where the built environment in countries like the UK is going to go more generally.

00:30:20:01 - 00:30:39:10
Speaker 2
We're going to see a lot more of these in coming years. And I'm always really keen to emphasize that people just push that little bit harder on these projects. This is a residential units up in Wembley in the north of London. It's a new building. So different context to what we're talking about today. But the message is the same.

00:30:39:15 - 00:31:07:10
Speaker 2
The developer built this and then happened to be speaking to a carbon consultant about other things and said, could I get you to do a study on my new building? So could you tell me how much lower carbon it could have been and how much I could have had, or how much of that I could have had within my existing cost plan and and this carbon consultant I know quite well, he basically assessed that he reckons that could have been a saving of about 40% on embodied carbon and 20% of operational carbon.

00:31:07:10 - 00:31:26:09
Speaker 2
And he thinks that's three quarters of that would have been cost neutral design changes. So nothing significant from the sort of architectural point of view. So it's just it's just important to sort of point out, if you ask these questions of your engineers and your architects on day one and if they've got the appropriate training, they can make really significant inroads on this.

00:31:26:09 - 00:31:56:02
Speaker 2
And it shouldn't cost you any money at all. It should be achievable within your current plan and I also always keen to stress you can, that there's no trade off between safety and sustainability. You can deliver the two alongside each other. It just means you need to go about designing things competently. And if you download this slide afterwards, you can download the links to these to these articles on the screen, the links near the bottom of that page, and final three or four slides.

00:31:56:02 - 00:32:16:16
Speaker 2
Now we'll take questions. So just to say that the institutions being, you know, generally be doing loads of work around this over the last three or four years, we've been trying to change what it means to be an engineer. We've been trying to make sustainability a really core part of the structural engineers job. So we've we've created guidance on this, as I've already already mentioned.

00:32:17:07 - 00:32:46:00
Speaker 2
But I just wanted to say to you that one of the other key things we've generated is quite a lot of training courses on the screen here is our embodied carbon basics training course. It's an e-learning course. So it's, it's on my videos I think adds up to about 4 hours of training. So, so there's an optional certificate at the end if you if you want to sort of do the test to get that, I'm flagging it to you because if you're listening to this and you think actually there's people in my team who need to know a bit more about this, so I want to know a bit more about this.

00:32:46:00 - 00:33:04:11
Speaker 2
This is a really quick way for you to get that information into your head because 4 hours is it's going to tell you all you need to learn and it's free for members. For those of you who aren’t online who aren't one of our members, which I guess is probably most of you, we do have a sort of affiliate scheme that I think costs about £50 a year to sign up.

00:33:04:11 - 00:33:29:11
Speaker 2
So if you sign up to that, you then get the members rate for things like this, which means this becomes free. That's a lot cheaper than paying the non-member price of the course. If people want details of that let me know afterwards. And the very final thing to say on IStructE action on this is that as of next year to become a chartered structural engineer in this country, you will need to be carbon literate.

00:33:29:11 - 00:33:57:03
Speaker 2
So in our chartered member exam and our interviews, we will be testing candidates on whether or not they can calculate, communicate and reduce embodied carbon, how well they understand reuse of buildings and how well they understand the wider sustainability thing. So the world is changing and the industry is changing and we're trying to sort of drive that. And hopefully that means that people such as yourselves will feel supported on your projects too, to make the make the right decisions as you go forwards.