THE GREAT BUILDING PRODUCTS SUSTAINABILITY DEBATE

Towards the end of 2007, sustain' hosted the BUILDING PRODUCTS SUSTAINABILITY DEBATE (sponsored by Kingspan Insulation Limited) at the Institute of Directors in central London. Chaired by Paul King, Chief Executive of the Green Building Council, a number of influential figures from the building products sector and the construction industry at large, gathered to discuss the question: What makes a building product sustainable?

(An abridged version of the day's discussion appears in volume 9 issue 1 of sustain' magazine)

In attendance were:

Trevor Butler, BDP
Alison Crompton, Faber Maunsell
Jonathan Essex, BioRegional
Nicola Fagan, Bureau Veritas
John Farrell, XCO2
John Garbutt, Kingspan
Alisdair Grainger, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
Mark Harris, SIKA Roofing
Professor Peter Hibberd, Joint Contracts Tribunal
Paul King, UK Green Building Council (Chair)
Jim McClelland, sustain'
Peter Morgan, Kingspan
Peter Quinn, Corus Group
Liz Reason, Director, AECB Carbonlite Programme
Bill Sneyd, CarbonNeutral Company
John Tebbitt, Construction Products Association

SUSTAINABILITY: HOW SHOULD WE MEASURE IT? What is a truly sustainable building product? If the manufacture of any particular product necessarily creates material and resource demands and carries potential for social and environmental impacts, what is the measure of its sustainability? How does the construction sector define 'green'? What should it mean?

John Garbutt: Question - what is a genuinely sustainable product? Well, a working definition might be a product on which whole lifecycle - not just the product in its manufacture - must, on balance, yield greater environmental, social and economic benefits than detriment. The problem with this is that there is no system apparently available by which you could possibly achieve that - there's no metric available in the UK to balance off the social, environmental and economic elements of manufactured products, nevermind the in-use phase of those products or end-of-life disposal.

So if you can't do that, what are you left with? Well, maybe we should just focus on environmentally sustainable aspects at the moment. So what is an environmentally sustainable product? Well the same thing, but just looking at that environmental part of the equation. So how can you do that? Well, eco-profiling is the first thing that springs to mind. But eco-profiling has its problems because it doesn't really touch the in-use phase of building and only just about covers end of life - and makes some very gross assumptions about end of life at that.

Carbon footprinting and embodied energy - well, it's a very, very limited cut through environmental sustainability, so is that particularly useful to us as a tool? Then can we really disassociate building materials from the buildings that they are used in? You might get one product that does a lot for saving the carbon emissions from a building - say, an insulation product - but then you've got another product which actually forms the structure of the building; and a building can't be a building without the two things working together. So are we philosophically barking up the right tree if we're trying to look at products in isolation.

Shouldn't we be looking at the building as a system and over its whole lifecycle? BRE Ecoprofiling seems to be the best tool available for looking at this broad range of environmental impacts - not just looking at carbon, but looking at acidification, sulphur dioxide emissions and a whole basket of other impacts. Like we've said, however, that doesn't cover in-use, but if you merge eco-profiling with the eco points generated by the building in use you could come up with a metric of eco points per square metre over the whole lifecycle of a building and then the design team could play with that specification - look at airtightness, look at U-values, look at materials selection and find a way to minimise the number of eco points per square metre over that whole lifecycle.

So, perhaps arguably, the definition that would be most useful for an environmentally sustainable building product would be to find products that deliver the buildings with the lowest whole life of ecopoints per square metre and not focus on individual materials, but focus on the whole system.

Peter Hibberd: I think you touch on a very interesting question, because when you come to whole-life costing, you've got two very important questions to ask yourself. One is the timescale, and the other is discount rate. The real problem isn't saying a product will last 5 or 10 years, it's putting it into the context of the building itself. So it doesn't matter if the building lasts 150 years or only 10 years - you could be using a product which has a lifespan of, say, 20 years and a building that only ultimately lasts 10 years. So you end up with some very difficult questions when it comes to whole-life costing. And discount rates are equally problematic as well.

John Tebbitt: Let's take another example which I think is very easy to understand. Let's take plasterboard - you've got a lump of plasterboard with a given environmental impact and if you go and put it in a partitioning for an office, that's going to last three or four years before it's ripped down and binned, despite the best efforts of everybody to recycle. That's a tremendous waste - if you go and nail it on to the wall of a house, it might last 60 or a 100 years, so its eco-points totally alter by the lifespan. All of these issues, the real crux of the matter is: what is the lifespan? And until you can sort that out in a way that people regard as fair and ethical you're always going to have this problem. But wholelife costing is the least-worse solution that we've got and we've got to make it work.

Jonathan Essex: So what makes a sustainable building? Well, at the moment we seem to be focusing on what makes a more sustainable building rather than what makes a sustainable enough building. And for climate change we need to limit our emissions. We need to measure the carbon emissions of our construction industry and deliver zero-carbon, zero waste in the future. And that challenge is a big one - so we do need to have the robustness, the lifecycle vision. We also need to measure our total impact - it's not good enough to be just slightly better than the other project because we've got more eco points, we need to be within environmental limits and we need to validate that, we need to assure that and we need to achieve that.

Liz Reason: John describes an artificially shortened lifetime whereby landlords who require anybody moving as a tenant out of one of their buildings to be replaced with another tenant, has to rip out the materials to rebuild it all and not to re-use it. So our problem is that we've got human behaviour in here and practices that actually have very little to do with materials themselves - it's our attitude to materials and how we regard them as disposable.

Alison Crompton: Maybe for a starting point to get us somewhere, we can think about different lifespans for different building uses. So maybe you can start to say, well, if it's used in a house we can accept a 60-year life and if it�s used in an office we can accept a 10-year life or a four-year life and perhaps that will highlight the ridiculous nature of lifespans.

John Garbutt: Jonathan (Essex) very much picks up on carbon and equates carbon to sustainability - I just worry about an overdue emphasis on carbon. Carbon is important - nobody denies the fact. But what babies are we potentially chucking out with the bathwater if we just focus on carbon and don't think about all the other things we need to look at. So for instance, you may bring in a low-carbon product but it may create a whole load of other environmental woes. I do think we need to have a broader picture and broader overview of things - yes, paying attention to carbon and doing something about that. I just don't think we can focus exclusively on carbon which is what a lot of people in the industry seem to want to do.

Trevor Butler: I think we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves at the moment - we're talking about whole life which is the right place to go to, but at the moment we don't know the recipe, or the 'Delia Smith method' of making construction products. We don't know how products are made, we don't know how the materials have got into them, we don't know the energy that's released, the emissions that are given off. The first thing that would be really helpful to the work that we do is to have a clear profile of the ingredients - the recipe if you like - for al the products that we specify in the construction industry. There needs to be a clear methodology and way of measuring. Eco points is a step into that and the Green Guide and other building handbooks, but we need to have a clear way of measuring one product against another. Because all the time, developers are saying to me: what's the greenest product we should use here and what goes into that? And we don't actually know.

John Tebbitt: With respect to the clients, they are asking unanswerable and stupid questions. What is the greenest product? Well, there is not a 'greenest' product. And as to what goes into a product, would they buy lead crystal glass? It's got lead in, Oh my God, that's poisonous! The problem is they don't know enough to know that they don't know. And that's where they need to be educated - that there's not a 'greenest' product. All the manufacturers will operate within the legal requirements and they can declare things ad nauseum and they can read the recipe, but the client wouldn't have a clue what it means and so they are just fundamentally wrong and it's your job to educate them that actually they are asking the wrong thing.

Trevor Butler: For John to tell me to tell my clients to stop asking these questions is just not acceptable. Okay, they're asking the wrong questions, but society is now in such a place where everyone is beginning to ask questions about their environmental impact. Okay, if they know what a product�s environmental impact is, it doesn't necessarily mean that they won't use it, they just want to know what it is. Whether it ends up getting specified or not, we�ve got to know what these products are so our clients can make an informed choice.

Mark Harris: The main contractor's the problem because that's the person in probably 60 per cent of the projects that makes the final decision on what goes on in the project. We deal with architects day in and day out and two thirds of them don't hold to specifications. It comes down to the lowest price and that decision will be with the main contractor or the specialist subcontractor - and that's where it falls apart.

Liz Pearson: The AECB was founded over the concern of materials and toxicity and chemical pollution etc... and while we're still extremely interested in that side of the debate, we are now trying to persuade clients to ask the question: how will this building perform? Because that's what really matters to a client and there isn't any single solution. Every building is different and requires a different solution and a different mix of products. So we may need to look at what is the lifetime environmental impact, but it isn't the be all and end all of this question.

John Farrell: Buildings are getting a lot more efficient today than they were 20 or 30 years ago which means that the embodied energy of materials is even more important than it ever was.

Alisdair Granger: The overwhelming emphasis should be on how the building is designed to be used and what systems are in there or whether perhaps micro wind generation is the best solution.

Alison Crompton: It might not be the way out, but if you want to keep it simple, one thing that people can understand is carbon offsetting. It's simple, nobody's asking anything complicated - if I want to feel good and I want to put something in my CSR report, I can pay the money, measured it and I won't have to worry about paying for expensive consultants to debate it and change the design. And so perhaps the first message is that that's not necessarily the solution, but do we not want something that's almost as simple to latch onto mentally if it's going to rival it?

Nicola Fagan: Do you not think we need to give companies who don't know what they're talking about some guidance along the lines of: here are the key types of materials to watch out for, give them 10 or 20 to look at and say, okay, these are the big ones that cost the most in terms of their social, environmental and economic impacts, work with them, find the best solution for your building and then overall it will be a better building. It might not tick all the boxes, it might not be a completely sustainable building, but you'll find out which ones are the hot topics for this type of building.

Bill Sneyd: I fully believe in keeping things simple. For the non-expert, for the CEO who's thinking of moving in to a new HQ, they're probably looking for something along the lines of A - G ratings that are coming in for the Energy Use of Buildings. Obviously, when it comes down to the contractors and people who are specifying individual materials, then you need the next three or four levels of detail for them to make the right choice. But I think making things visible is absolutely key to getting a change, because if the CEO of a big company sees that the building he's about to move into is a D-rated building and one of his business rivals is in an A-rated building it's certainly going to get that competition going and drive change.

John Farrell: I'm all for colour-coding and grading materials, but the problem with building materials is it's not like you can just have one yardstick. Embodied energy is just one aspect, toxicity is another. I think it's something that needs to be categorised into maybe four or five headings than labels. It's still quite simple, but it's not a simple problem so it's not going to be a simple solution.

Peter Quinn: With any product, it's very difficult to understand how you rank, say, the contribution of affordability, or pleasant to live in against all those things like the environmental impact - they're far more subjective. One of the big problems we've got is that all of the rating systems which currently exist only look at the environment and I think that what would be useful is how we value the other pillars of sustainability. We're not just talking about whether the company in the supply chain makes lots of money out of it, we're talking about can the person at the end of the supply chain afford it?

Jonathan Essex: I don't think just focussing on carbon is veering off wildly or is it throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no point trying to focus on everything that's in the bath and hoping that the baby will survive - you need to actually focus on the baby as well. In terms of the layman understanding things, I would ask the average engineer what the strength of steel is and then ask the engineer if they know what the embodied carbon of that piece of steel is - I would argue that most engineers would know the answer to the first question, but won't have the faintest idea about the second. They might be able to tell you whether steel is better than concrete, or concrete is better than steel, but giving you an absolute answer as to what the concrete or steel's impact to the environment actually is, what the whole building's impact to the environment is, I think you'll find that they find it quite difficult.

So the one message I would say is, yes we can take responsibility for the future we're creating, but we'll be judged on what we do now. The industry needs to take responsibility for its own house and get its own house in order. We also need to not just focus on building buildings. The construction industry does more than just build buildings - it builds things which allow people to live in those buildings - to get to them, to have a water supply, to have an electricity supply - and if we're going to take responsibility as a construction industry, we do need to look at the embodied carbon of all that we create. If we only focus on the in use and we don't take responsibility for what we do now, our emissions now will eliminate the chance for us to use that amount of energy down the line.

HOW SHOULD WE MANAGE IT? What is responsible sourcing? How can policies on sustainable procurement and supply-chain management be interpreted and applied effectively to deliver on development and project objectives? How can issues of risk and liability be managed in this context. Can sustainability be written into the contract?

Peter Hibberd: We've been talking about the specification of things, but what we haven't touched on very much of course is the actual use of resources and the behaviour behind the use of resources. I think if we change the behaviour behind the use of resources, then you solve an awful lot of the problems. It seems to many that collaborative working through the supply chain is beneficial for the end product. If we all start to own a problem and we all recognise that sustainability is an issue then it becomes a damn sight easier to actually resolve. And part of the problem is that in construction terms you've actually got a fragmentation of the process in procurement. So if you then start to move towards changing procurement - and there is a suggestion by some that you should - and you move to a design and build concept, you pull the bits together in exactly the same way as a product manufacturer already does, that is actually desirable, because of integrated teams. To my mind, the real answer lies in the interfaces between three components: the interface between the client; the design; and the interface between the design and the process. That's why people like design and build because it seems to pull those things together, more so than the traditional fragmentations we have got. There is a very big problem and that is that each of us can only do a very small part. We might not even be sure what our part is in the whole. But so long as we've got a genuine belief that we're doing the right thing - however small it is - and pursue it, then we're on the right track.

Paul King: Sometimes I get frustrated by people talking about sustainability as if it's so 'other' to everything else that business is about. And it seems to me that it's helpful to think about sustainability as another facet of quality. So let's not talk about this as if it's a completely mysterious process. The problem is how do we reconcile that basic notion of improvement that's inherent to industrial development and human evolution with the urgency with which we have to do this. On the one hand, yes, let's take the small improvements and see where they lead us and let's learn from that, but is it going to get us there fast enough?

Peter Hibberd: Most individuals can only work at that very tactical level and do their little piece. Unless we are prepared to change our way of life, you're not going to be able to deal with the problem. This continuous improvement in the past has been fine, because its implications for the world as a whole have obviously been quite small and localised. Now the actual problem is globalised, you're going to have to start changing the way you operate. There's got to be a political will here if you are going to deliver that change.

John Garbutt: How do we get that cultural change? The building industry today can't even achieve current building regulations which are relatively simple in comparison to trying to measure something as complicated as sustainability. So how the heck are we going to police this? Unless the market decides to do it of its own volition or every builder suddenly gets a green brainwashing session how do we engender that culture of change in the society of building?

Liz Reason: It is a major challenge. The benefit of the 2016 gauntlet is that it has focused people's attentions and made them acknowledge that they've got a lot of learning to do and a lot of changes to make. And quite honestly, I would start putting things into contracts which say: "Your building will perform in these various ways and you will be held to it in some way if you don't." And in the first instance, let�s not penalise people, let's just ask them to make visible how their buildings perform so that we can all learn together.

John Farrell: I don't see why the like of manufacturers should wait for the Government to lay down this kind of legislation. Supermarkets, for instance, are already stamping and rating their food in terms of how sustainable it is, so there is no reason that building-product manufacturers can't begin to do that themselves and then it would encourage their competitors to do the same.

John Tebbitt: Traffic lights on food. Great. But we've already got two separate schemes, because two big groups can't agree on how they're going to measure it. Traffic lights on building products? Well, let's go back to something simple like our plasterboard. Which system are we going to use to measure it? We've been arguing about that for 10 years. And then what stickers are you going to put in? A red sticker if it goes into the office because that's going to be ripped out; a green one if it's going to go into something that's going to be used for 100 years? I think architects should be paid a lot more to actually look at the overall performance of the building. They do not need judgements of whether a product is either A, B or C - what they need is the individual bits of data that go up to make the eco profile, you then add up all your bits and look at it as a whole - it's already available.

Trevor Butler: One thing that's changed in the last few years has been the air testing of buildings. Contractors really hated that when it first came in - they still don't like it and, although it's become accepted, it's taken three or four years to get to that point. The next one is taking thermal images of buildings on practical completion - so the back of changing this process is beginning to get broken, but it's going to take a little while. And some contractors are starting to take it quite seriously and have been boasting about an award they won last year for best green site etc... so it is getting into the cultural psyche as well. So you've got to do it contractually, you've got to do it socially, you've got to tap into the competitiveness of people, work across the whole range and make it interesting and exciting.

Paul King: If the client gets down to setting his targets and wants to know about the environmental impacts of these products that are going into his building, have we got the tools and are the systems in place?

John Tebbitt: I believe they're there. Kingspan have used SpeAr. There are other commercial tools available. Other companies like Marshalls have done it.

Jonathan Essex: Firstly measure and secondly take leadership. I think that at the moment, most companies think that if they get BREEAM Excellent and follow Part L and be ahead of the game, then we'll all win. But unfortunately the science doesn't say 60 per cent to 80 per cent by 2050 - that's what the Government politicians say. The scientists say that to get a 50 per cent chance of succeeding, we need a 90 per cent cut by 2050. So we reduce it to the politicians' target and then we go for a panic system, we don't focus on everything, we just focus on the building. What we need to do is link the vision to the strategic, to the tactics and the way we need to do that is to have measurement systems that go from the tools that we use right the way up. So we don't just provide leadership within our silo, we actually lead. Because we win this race not when we - our company - gets to the end, but when everyone gets to the end. So it's about shared responsibility in a way that we accept we're doing the best that we are and that we accept that everyone around us is doing the best that they can do, but somehow if we work together, if we have collaborative, partnership-based approaches, we can all finish together.

HOW SHOULD WE MESSAGE IT? What is greenwash? Over and above the legal baseline required by the communications and media watchdogs (such as the ASA), what claims and statements made for the purposes of marketing and promoting the sustainability credentials of building products qualify as acceptable, credible and responsible messages? What particular terms or expressions in common usage - such as 'environmentally friendly' - are considered meaningless, invalid, or even misleading when unsubstantiated?

Mark Harris: Next year we want to start promoting our products on an environmental basis - it's something we've been working towards for about 4 or 5 years, to make sure we have enough ducks in a row so that we could substantiate our claims. This came out of the frustration of reading lots of advertising and press pieces in the wide media where people would make lots of claims that they can't back up. How many adverts do you see where it says the product is environmentally friendly. Well, every company I looked at, two thirds of them don't even have ISO14001 product production. That would surely be a very basic measure of whether they have any form of environmental credentials. So we want to make our claims as a company in the market and we want to substantiate them. But there's no way at present for measurement.

John Tebbitt: I think we mustn't confuse the producer and the product. Let's give an example. Say you've got an arms manufacturer making bullets which we would not regard as a sustainable product, but they've got ISO14001 and they've got responsible sourcing of the lead - would that have any influence on how you regarded the products? On the other hand, if you said, well actually, because it's an awful product we don't give a damn how they're produced. Is that a good thing? So we need to look at the producer and the product - how do you tie them together and, indeed, should you tie them together, because there's pros and cons on both sides.

John Garbutt: If, in purely product-selection terms, there's little difference between the products you're looking at, then what you're left with is what the manufacturer does and how it manufactures its products. And those manufacturers have got to set their stall out and tell you what they do and what their policies and procedures are and that's one metric you can use to assess different manufacturers and products. People shouldn't just make nebulous free claims - they should go out, research, report, have it independently assessed, make public declarations, stick their heads above the parapet and be prepared to be taken to task if they don't do what they say they're going to do. Then you're safe. But if you're prepared to tread over that line and start to say things that you can't back up, then I'm afraid you should be hauled up in front of the green police and get taken to task.

Alison Crompton: You've got the Enhanced Capital Allowances Scheme for energy-efficiency products and that means that if you go on EST's website, you pick a product off that list, it is a greener product. Perhaps that's the sort of thing we need for the basic products - that started off with a small number of categories and then more and more product ranges have been added, but perhaps that's a legitimate way forward and it could be linked to Enhanced Capital Allowances or whatever, but it may provide a good shopping list.

Paul King: What are the big no-nos when it comes to marketing building products?

John Tebbitt: I think meaningless terms like "environmentally friendly" - but if we took that out we wouldn't have any adverts. The other one is where particular characteristics are claimed and somebody has developed their own test. There are usually standards, either national, British, European or even International - use those. If you develop your own standard for a well-known characteristic - why are you doing it? So you can get a better claim for that characteristic. Now that should be banned.

Trevor Butler: We've seen this happen - one of our architects specified some sustainable timber to replace a gallery flooring in Scotland and, sure enough, they had the certificate, but then Greenpeace turned up one morning with a TV crew and the press and the sustainable timber certificate which looked like something Del Boy had sold on the market. And of course there was no way of testing it. So it's very difficult to get the message clear and understand what you're getting. And as a specifier who doesn't want to embarrass his clients with Greenpeace's publicity, I've got to be sure that I'm going to give them a good message and at the moment I'm not confident I can do that at all times.

Paul King: The moment of conversion for B&Q; was when Friends of the Earth wheeled 30ft inflatable chainsaws into their carparks and said you're cutting down the world's rainforests. That focused things in their minds - they were asked a very simple question: "How do you know that you're not chopping down the world�s rainforests?" And they simply didn't know the answer to that question. They realised what a risk that represented - if we don't know where this is coming from, and the not-knowing is so much more potentially damaging than having not got it all right. We should make the move from not knowing to knowing, even if we don't like the answer, to making sure that this stuff is at least legal and then try and figure out how to make it more sustainable.

John Tebbitt: One of the things we need to do is: education, education, education. Getting through particularly to youngsters and making it a challenge, rather than, "you're all going to die horribly because of what your parents did" - because that will not work. Unless you get the children interested, and get them to become engineers and scientists and constructors then you are doing good. Because at the end of the day, it's the construction industry and people making products that will actually save it.