Price & Myers is a signatory to the Climate and Biodiversity Emergency Declaration 2019. The Declaration includes a commitment to action on 11 key points – including raising awareness, advocating for faster change, evaluating all new projects, and sharing knowledge and research (https://www.structuralengineersdeclare.com/). Compliant with our declaration, we once again offer our Embodied Carbon Data and Targets.
We are leading the UK construction industry in our collection and public dissemination of embodied carbon figures, which have been used to set the Benchmarks and Embodied Carbon Targets for several industry bodies (Institute of Structural Engineers, BECD, and Net Zero Carbon Building Standard among them).
Price & Myers now collect embodied carbon figures for every building over a threshold fee of £25,000, but actively encourage our engineers to carry out calculations on every project. The results from this data collection have helped to inform our design decisions, and have enabled us to reduce the average value of embodied carbon per m2 of floor area designed in our projects by 5% in 2021 (down to 331 kgCO2e/m2) and an additional 8% in 2022 (down to 303 kgCO2e/m2), from our 2020 baseline figure of 349 kgCO2e/m2. Our target is to continue to reduce the Practice’s average figure by 10% each year to reach figure <150kgCO2e/m2 by 2029, equivalent to a SCORS A Rating.
We should note that this reduction will not be solely reliant on our design decisions as structural and civil engineers. In order to achieve this reduction; there will need to be a decrease in the embodied carbon intensity of the materials that we use, different methods of construction and changes to industry norms; changes to the acceptability of different materials and innovative solutions. With this in mind, while we continue to monitor the embodied carbon intensity of the buildings we work on, we have also started to monitor the mass of material per m2 within our buildings. E.g. the kg of steel, concrete and timber per m2 of the buildings we specify. This value will allow us to more directly check how our designs are changing, and disaggregates the impact of changing embodied carbon factors which are often outside of our control. As we build our data for these new data points, we will set targets for the reduction of these values too, and we expect this will become more commonplace in the industry over the coming years.
