Hi, Zoë - how are you?

 

Hi, I'm good, thank you. How are you doing?

 

I'm very good. I wanted to ask you about your two-part report called 'Counting the upfront carbon in Cat B office fit-out'. Now, this is a very complex subject and material, but what would you say are the key messages from those reports?

 

The most important thing, I guess, that's come out of this report, is that magic number, this 190 kilograms of CO2e per metre squared (190 kg CO2e/m2). It's a number that we didn't think was possible to arrive at, and the industry, I think, was shying away from trying to calculate because they knew it was such a complicated task to try and arrive at one number for a fit-out project. But that key finding – albeit it's not perfect and won't suit every single project or all the variations there are in fit-out – is a really great starting point for us to then build that knowledge base further. And to see where projects do vary away from that 190…or not.

 

What's so significant about that number?

 

We decided to do the research because the Net Zero Carbon Building Standard at the time was looking for evidence. Unfortunately, the call for evidence hadn't been very successful for the fit-out industry. They'd received lots of shell and core data, but not fit-out, and as such, because they simply didn't have the evidence base, the Net Zero Carbon Building Standard original plan was to simply not include a number for fit-out, because they couldn't even guess at what that was, based on the few whole-life carbon assessments that they'd received. So arriving at this number was important so that what we think will probably become the leading certification in the industry, the Net Zero Carbon Building standard, to ensure that that standard actually catered for fit-out as well as shell and core, which I think our report serves to demonstrate is potentially just as impactful as a shell and core, once you take into account the cumulative impact of a fit-out being repeated far more often, of course, than shell and core construction.

 

Fit-outs presumably differ from scheme to scheme, quite significantly. So how did you arrive at a standard?

 

Well, that was the very tricky thing, and I guess it's the reason why this research hadn't been conducted before – fit-outs differ so significantly. So, this report focused solely on Cat B. Of course, there is currently a lot of dialogue in the industry at the moment about preventing Cat A, anyway because there can be lots of waste involved. But Cat B probably is the more difficult part of the puzzle to complete because it’s so variable depending on the scope of the fit-out, which will be dictated by the client's needs, the type of the business they are, and so forth. That was the thing that really prevented anyone from looking into what I guess everybody knew was going to be a really difficult task. So when we approached this we knew as a group – and I assembled a fabulous team of experts from the industry to help with the project - we knew from our own individual experiences that we all had whole-life carbon assessments for fit-out projects. So it began simply by bringing all of those together and having a look at the numbers. Then, of course, we had to go through a process of refining those because some of the data wasn't as good quality as we would have liked. Therefore, some whole-life carbon assessments had to be excluded. Once we excluded those that were potentially not representative of a fit-out project,  and we had a core dataset of whole-life carbon assessments, we could then begin to look into the details and see whether they were representative of an overall number for an average fit-out.

 

So, what is the ultimate aim? I'm presuming the ultimate aim in the big bad world is to get us in line with the 1.5-degree trajectory and reduce carbon impact across the board. But what is the aim in homing in on our sector?

 

Absolutely, yes. So, the aim of the Net Zero Carbon Building Standard is of course, to align with the 1.5-degree trajectory. And similarly, for the fit-out industry to get to that same kind of net zero-aligned scenario, we needed to understand what parts our fit-outs were playing in that overall picture of a whole building. And although it's just a number which tells us where we are now, the point is that once you understand where you are, you can then set targets for reduction, which is what we hope people will use this report for, regardless of whether they look at the Net Zero Carbon Building Standard, which, of course, I hope lots of people do engage with. But ultimately, the fit-out industry could use this number independently to set their own internal targets, which, again, over in Morgan Lovell, we've been having conversations internally about how we use that number and whether we set minimum standards when we're designing projects, on our design and build projects, and then simply comparing it on our traditional projects that are designed by others.

 

It's a lot of work, isn't it, this report? I mean, the group you assembled from practices like Hoare Lea and Perkins and Will and LandSec, etc, they all give their time for free, and it's a lot of time, presumably. How did you put together this report? What were the mechanics of it?

 

It was a lot of tireless dedication by some honestly, absolutely inspiring individuals. And probably second to the number coming out of it was the fabulous feelgood factor from having asked all these people to pretty much drop everything at a moment's notice and get involved. And of course, everyone's got very busy work lives and home lives. The fact that people answered that call, and I said, you know, we've got six weeks to deliver this research...

 

Wow!

 

 ...and everyone had full diaries at that point, and there was just no way this was all going to be integrated into people's working days. So, people were working evenings and weekends to get this done, because they cared as much, I guess, as I did, about finding out what that number was and making sure that the fit-out industry was held to account in a similar way to base build, shell and core construction is at the moment. Everyone involved in that should be incredibly proud of what we achieved, because it could have been very easy to give up along the way, with how tough it was, and how much work it was, and how much organization to just bring all the different work streams of research together. The research, of course, was divided into the two parts, the main number, but then alongside that, knowing that we had some really tricky areas in fit-out that were more difficult to model from a carbon perspective, I then set up different working groups looking into things like joinery, staircases, catering – areas where we knew that once the whole life carbon assessments came back, they were not going to be very robust in those areas, because people were calculating for those elements in different ways. They weren't calculating them at all. We knew that if we included a number in the Net Zero Carbon Building Standard, it needed to be as robust as possible and include those things that, you know, maybe the industry wasn't quite there with yet. But we needed to understand that and integrate it into the 190 that we came up with, which thankfully, we did. But even in itself, just pulling together then all those different pieces of research into one final number was a really tricky piece. But great negotiation by everyone who was involved to arrive at a number that we had consensus on, and everyone felt comfortable with.  

 

Well, congratulations on it. It really does show how seriously all of the industry takes the environmental challenge, I think. So, what happens now to this report? How is it used? 

 

Well, I certainly hope that design practices will use that number as a benchmark for their projects. It, of course, is going to be representative of an average project. So, there will be projects that try to lower carbon and potentially still come out higher than that number. And there will be potentially projects that don't have to work that hard, but end up lower. But if we have a number to work with, and we start seeing where that spread of information is, because we have an average to work to, we can start to then refine that data further. And then maybe there was certainly talk in the group at the time of getting together in six months or a year's time to have a look at the further whole-life carbon assessments that have been generated since then to see if that number can be refined down further, certainly breaking things down elementally. So, looking at the staircases, looking at partitions, looking at ceilings; it can become a little bit easier to work out where averages lie and where the range is. And that's how I believe standards like the SKA rating are moving. That rating scheme is obviously looking specifically at interior fit-out and has always been designed to suit the fit-out market. And because of the way that the standard is divided up and broken into different elements, there's the potential for that standard, when it gets refined - which it is undergoing now - to provide a carbon number per element, which actually might be easier for the fit-out industry to interpret and work with, and hold different sectors within the fit-out industry to account, so that we can look at ceilings and say, look, this is the range. This is the average. So actually, if you want to be on the better side of average, this is where you need to be. And then, of course, if all those elements stack up, and they're all looking like they're the better side of average, then that should, in theory, equal a number that will be lower than the 190 that we eventually came up with for an average fit-out.

 

Well, congratulations again, and to all your contributors, and thanks for talking it through.

 

You are very welcome. Thank you for listening. 

Click below to download the 'Counting the upfront carbon in Cat B office fit-out' report.