Construction and engineering company Laing O’Rourke has set embodied carbon benchmarks for low carbon concrete after publishing its maximum tolerance for carbon emissions in the concrete products it buys.
The company, on Tuesday, claimed this could be a first, in a move that’s been strongly welcomed by the Materials & Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance.
The benchmarks meant that the company and will only buy materials in Australia that contain embodied carbon below the guaranteed cap for its public infrastructure and private projects. Its contractors will be obliged to do the same.
All new projects the company works on will also adopt carbon limits as a minimum requirement, while live projects will be encouraged to benchmark against this requirement.
The hope is that the new sustainability measure will reduce demand for high emissions concrete and pressure suppliers to increase the supply of low-emission building materials.
Carbon emissions incurred while manufacturing materials count towards the buyer’s scope 3 emissions. Scope 3 emissions also represent around 95 per cent of the construction company’s overall emissions.
Hollie Hynes, Laing O’Rourke’s general manager for sustainability and environment, said, “We are setting a limit to the embodied emissions that we will accept in our concrete mixes because this material will have one of the greatest impacts on our journey to net zero. If we get concrete right, we will go a long way towards achieving our sustainability goals.
“We intend to use this embodied carbon measure as a valid performance metric for concrete, and our projects. Once we’ve established this, we can increase our internal minimum requirement as allowed by our client’s specifications and market availability.
And there’s more
The company has also set a definition for how concrete products can be considered “low carbon” with reference to specific embodied carbon limits for concrete of different strength grades. The new benchmarks the company sets will be expressed in kilograms of carbon dioxide per cubic metre of concrete.
Laing O’Rourke’s low carbon materials lead, Monica Hanus-Smith, said, “Until now, there has been no widely accepted definition of low carbon concrete in Australia, and without one, naming a concrete mix as such has been subjective and open to interpretation.”
“We’re drawing a line in the sand for our business to be consistent and transparent and for our stakeholders to understand what we mean when we talk about ‘low carbon concrete.”
Monica Richter, project director of the Materials & Embodied Carbon Leaders’ Alliance, said the initiative was a “great example of industry leadership in decarbonisation”.
“Laing O’Rourke is one of the most advanced construction firms in Australia in setting their definition of what they expect of the concrete supply chain.
“This announcement is a message for all concrete suppliers across Australia that embodied carbon becomes part of measuring success alongside performance, durability, and cost. One might expect that this position will become a new ‘normal’ for Australian concrete in the foreseeable future.”
The company hopes to achieve net zero operational emissions for all its sites by 2030. It also hopes to deliver nature positive solutions before 2050.