Memorandum by the Building Research Establishment
(BRE)
The BRE Group is a world leading research, consultancy,
training, testing and certification organisation delivering sustainability
and innovation across the built environment and beyond.
Our mission is to "Build a better world".
We help our clients create better buildings and communities and
solve problems with confidence.
BRE CENTRE
FOR RESOURCE
EFFICIENCY
BRE's Centre for Resource Efficiency actively
seeks to work with organisations that share their objective of:
"Reduce environmental impacts and costs through resource
efficiency".
BRE's Centre for Resource Efficiency is continually
developing its capabilities as a world-leading centre of expertise
on waste auditing, waste minimisation and waste management in
the construction, demolition, refurbishment, manufacturing and
related industries. The Centre provides a one-stop-shop of integrated
solutions to the whole supply chain on all aspects of material
waste including research, consultancy, testing, re-engineering
and specifying. The Centre has pioneered best practice in construction
resource efficiency with a range of different projects, services,
techniques and software tools available to the industry.
We have considered each of the issues raised
in this inquiry and have included a response where appropriate
BETTER DESIGN
AND THE
USE OF
MATERIALS
Design and the use of materials
Design could play an important part in achieving
waste reduction in the built environment. However, there are a
multitude of considerations in addition to resource efficiency
that take priority. These include look, design life, whole life
cost, skills, time, operational energy and water use, life cycle
impacts of materials to name but a few. Resource efficiency needs
to be embedded within this overall design decision making to avoid
being a sidelined activity. Simple messages on waste reduction
and design include:
— precut materials delivered to site;
— off site fabricated products;
— specifying materials with lower wastage
rates on installation, lower hazard content, fit for purpose and
design life;
— design for deconstruction, repair
and refurbishment; and
— long lived and durable buildings
(avoiding design that becomes easily dated/shabby).
Sustainability and the use of materials
In the context of life cycle assessment, waste
issues form part of the overall assessment. If these issues are
separated and focused on without this overall context, there is
a risk that overall environmental impact could increase. It is
important that waste is considered, along with resource efficiency,
within the wider sustainable consumption and production agenda.
Energy use and water use are other key environmental impacts to
consider.
We propose adopting a decision making hierarchy
that enables:
— overall life cycle impact to be considered
as a first priority;
— single impacts to be focused on and
improvements made; and
— reiteration of overall life cycle
impacts following single impact improvements.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is basically the
combined effect of single impacts. Therefore, it could be concluded
that material resource efficiency measures will affect the LCA
result in a positive or negative way. If the result is positive
then these measures should be accelerated.
This is fine in principle, if all products and
processes have reported in terms of LCA and it is easy to extract
the data relating to single impacts. Many construction products
do not have a Type III environmental declaration.[1]
It is also difficult to see how LCA in the construction products
field will drive forward material resource efficiency measures.
This is partly due to incomplete LCA data, but also due to the
weighting allocated to impacts.
Weighting of LCA data is the only way to derive
a single metric, eg carbon equivalence or ecopoints. It is also
an inherently subjective process. Climate change and the need
to reduce fossil fuel consumption has meant that related impacts
attract a higher weighting than any other type of impact. In the
absence of other drivers this would not be a problem, ie most
of the focus would be on reducing energy with other issues only
considered once this has been achieved. However, we are living
in a world where multiple drivers operate including the need to:
— reduce waste to landfill;
— reduce consumption of materials;
— reduce contamination of the environment;
— reduce whole life costs; and
— reduce local environmental/social
impact.
The current status of LCA does not reconcile
all these needs sufficiently.
Figure 1
POSSIBLE DECISION MAKING APPROACH FOR PRODUCT
SELECTION
Better designed products and consumption
There is no simple answer in isolation of how
the products will be specified, distributed, installed, maintained
and removed/disposed of. Therefore, decisions made by all those
in the supply chain should be considered when improving the design
of certain products.
An integrated approach to waste reduction in
the construction sector would achieve greater impacts than one
reliant upon design decisions. For example:
| Commitments |
Purpose/Links |
| Set baseline data for construction related waste
| Start process of improvement |
| Measure performance consistently in terms of waste reduction, reuse, recycling etc per company, sector, process and product
| Measure levels of improvement |
| Extended producer responsibility for all key construction products OR industry agreed voluntary commitments
| Promote resource efficiency on a product basis, eg returnable packaging, ecodesign
|
| Supply chain commitments in place for all government procured projects
| Targets for waste reduction will only be met if the supply chain is committed to combined action
|
| Relevant professional training/education to include modules on resource efficiency
| Construction professionals educated to consider resource efficiency to be part of their future jobs eg designers
|
| Strengthen the Code for Sustainable Homes to require significant waste reduction at levels 3 onwards
| Sets out requirements to reduce waste as part of overall standard
|
| Recommendations | |
| Develop consistent method of measuring carbon impacts relating to waste and resources
| Links to reducing overall environmental impact of construction through better decision making
|
| Develop consistent method of measuring whole life cost impacts relating to waste and resources
| Links to reducing overall cost of resources and waste through better decision making
|
| Encourage the reduction of waste in preference to recycling
| Recycling has been promoted above reduction and reuse. It is important to redress the balance
|
BUSINESS FRAMEWORK
The introduction of Site Waste Management Plans from April
2008 (to be confirmed) provides a good foundation upon which to
encourage waste reduction throughout the supply chain. In the
first few years it is likely that businesses will focus upon demonstrating
compliance with the legislation and associated policies, such
as the Code for Sustainable Homes. However, BRE is developing
Site Waste Management Planning tools with a carbon calculator
module to drive the user much more in the direction of waste reduction.
The logic in applying carbon calculation mainly derives from the
reduction in embodied energy from using less materials. Carbon
benefits from recycling are likely to be far less significant
when compared to not producing the waste in the first place. Our
tools will make this saving much more obvious, which along with
the better cost savings should eventually promote waste reduction
within a framework of overall sustainability ie avoiding the trap
of focusing on a single sustainability issue.
Waste reduction in action
BRE believes that most construction waste can be avoided
if the supply chain is set up to prevent it arising. This is the
premise behind an industry and government funded project currently
underway. This project—Be Aware—tracks products through
their life cycle, collecting data on how much and what waste is
produced along the way. The next stage is to model alternative
scenarios in terms of improved resource efficiency and the overall
life cycle impact resulting. Over the next few months, supply
chain workshops will be carried out with certain sectors, including
modern methods of construction, plastic/ composite construction
products, and timber based construction products. At these workshops,
the industry stakeholders will be presented with the data captured
for each set of products and asked to identify opportunities and
barriers to reducing waste at each stage of the product life cycle.
The results of each workshop will be used to generate guidance
for each sector group. The points of intervention and life cycle
are summarised in the diagram below.
Figure 2
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
Better information is needed to facilitate waste reduction.
There is little point presenting the construction sector with
generic targets to reduce waste unless these are accompanied by
more specific guidance and data on who is accountable for which
aspect of the waste stream. Isolating this information is a pre-requisite
to developing sector based voluntary agreements/commitments to
reduce waste, as illustrated in the Ashdown agreement. This agreement
has been completed for the manufacturers of plasterboard and is
still being developed for other aspects of the supply chain, such
as design, installation and demolition. Once all the specific
agreements are in place, it will be possible to bring them altogether
within a supply chain agreement to reduce waste and divert waste
from landfill. Then it will be necessary to report progress against
the overall and specific agreements.
BRE has been developing construction waste benchmarks for
over 10 years. A Defra funded project is helping to create the
first comprehensive set of national construction, refurbishment
and demolition benchmarks. These are accessed from our smartwaste
web site and will be added to by other datasets, along with those
generated through BRE's web-base reporting software. The site
waste management planning tool currently under development will
add significant data to the benchmarking web site and support
the construction industry in predicting the waste they will produce,
set targets for waste reduction and measure progress towards those
targets.
Government support role
Government funded support is extensive in this area, perhaps
to the point of having "too many cooks", some of which
are attempting to attract the attention of the same businesses.
This causes confusion in terms of where to access the best support.
A thorough knowledge of the construction sector should be a pre-requisite
to offering support in this area. Without this, the support agencies
tend to over-simplify resource efficiency, eg recycling/recycled
content, and under estimate the interdependencies in the supply
chain and overall building performance.
Product design and consumption patterns and behaviour
A great deal of debate revolves around the need to conserve
resources compared with reducing operational impacts of buildings.
A recent report suggested that carbon emissions from homes could
only be reduced to levels required for government targets if levels
of demolition were significantly increased, ie knock down poorly
performing homes and replace with new energy efficient ones.
One major concern with this recommendation would be the massive
increase in demolition waste. Demolition waste may form the bulk
of the 100 million tonnes per year produced from construction
related waste (no-one knows the actual breakdown of composition
in terms of construction, demolition and refurbishment waste).
If demolition rates increase, so does the amount of waste produced.
Currently, around 90 per cent of demolition waste is recycled;
these high recycling levels cannot be sustained should waste produced
increase and markets shrink. Markets may decline due to the move
from more traditional forms of construction to those more likely
to be lighter weight and off site fabricated. These modern methods
of construction offer savings in terms of time and skills; the
case has yet to be proven for reduced waste production over the
life cycle.
The alternative to increasing demolition is to improve the
environmental performance of existing homes so that the materials
used to build them are kept in the building stock. Realisation
that it is absolutely essential to improve the existing building
stock's operational performance is increasing within government,
industry and building owners. BRE is offering support to all these
stakeholders through its work on refurbishment case studies (BRE
Stable Block), decision making tools (T-Zero) and certification
of domestic energy assessors, micro generation products and installers.
With all the increase in refurbishment activity will be an increase
in waste. The T-Zero project is gathering data on a whole range
of environmental issues, including the amount and type of waste
associated with refurbishment. Pre-refurbishment audits can identify
products and materials that can be retained whilst minimising
waste produced from the installation of new products.
1
Type III environmental declarations present quantified environmental
information on the life cycle of a product (based on independently
verified LCA data, LCI data or information modules in accordance
with the ISO 14040 series) to enable comparisons between products
fulfilling the same function. Back
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