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Whole Life Carbon

Thomas Store, Low/Zero Carbon Construction ManagerWhat is whole life carbon?

With an increasing focus on lowering carbon emissions to attempt to reduce the effects of global warming and climate change, questions of the construction sector’s carbon impact arise.

Part L of the Building Regulations already focuses on measuring predicted building operational energy and result carbon emissions. These regulations will, over time, require increasing energy and carbon efficiency improvements whereby domestic dwellings and non-domestic buildings are to be zero carbon by 2016 and 2019 respectively.

However, Part L of the Building Regulations ignores the embodied carbon of materials that are used and their end of life carbon impacts. As a building’s operational carbon emissions reduce in line with building regulation requirements so the relative importance of whole life carbon emissions in buildings increases. Few developers or producers of construction materials measure whole life cycle carbon impacts but those that have include Davis Langdon and construction materials producers Aggregate Industries and Marshalls. Although whole life costing is at an early stage, some estimate that carbon embodied in construction materials could exceed a building’s operational carbon footprint over its lifetime and underlines how important it is that we understand the true implications of the way we construct.

Constructing Excellence South West (CESW) and Future Foundations (FF), with funding from South West Regional Development Agency, are developing a two and half year project on whole life carbon assessment in construction. Activities will include:

  • The development of tools to aid better decision making in reducing whole life carbon in construction
  • The development of a network of whole life carbon evaluation expertise in the SW and establish appropriate partnerships
  • The development of relevant case studies
  • The dissemination of findings from the project

If you would like more information about this project please email Thomas Store 

More details and how to get involved here

Whole Life Carbon Event

On Thursday 12th May Constructing Excellence South West & Future Foundations, along with Sustain hosted  the "Whole Life Carbon: the sum of the parts" conference which provided the latest knowledge, experience and thinking on embodied carbon in construction. View conference details and speakers' presentations here