CM comment: Green is good, but less is more

We struggle with a target-orientated, over-complicated system, so Albert Ree says let’s keep it simple – and also acknowledge that the construction industry is actually doing well in the sustainability stakes.

Possibly because sustainability covers such a wide range of issues, I believe the construction industry has fallen into the trap of over-complicating things – over-measuring, over-reporting and over-producing "best practice" guidance. It’s time for the industry to go back to basics, and the solution is simplicity itself: true sustainable performance can be achieved by implementing best practice, common sense and innovative, practical working from the ground up to improve business efficiency.

Everyone in construction can relate to saving carbon and water on site, as we do it naturally at home. Switching the electricity supply on site from temporary diesel-run generators makes a huge difference, as does running a more economical fleet. There’s a whole range of simple things that people do with almost no thought that can have a huge effect.

I worked on a brownfield site project 20 years ago where there were several thousand tonnes of contaminated waste, which were used in the substructure as it was less costly than removing it from site – it wasn’t called sustainability, it was called good construction management.

But now we’re over-complicating it. I’ve just looked at new guidance documents from Defra asking us to provide data for our Carbon Reduction Commitment return – it asks for data evaluation of fluorocarbon emissions! It’s far too technical and demanding. The guidelines are no doubt driven by the government’s need to capture consistent carbon data across all industries, but if  fluorocarbon emissions only account for 0.1% of total greenhouse gas emissions, why are we creating such a burden?

We all know the axiom “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. In principle it’s great, but in practice all the measuring and reporting becomes a burden or an end in itself, and creates a tick-box mentality. BREEAM is a good example. Rather than chasing BREEAM ratings, we must be more flexible in our approach. Historically, the best results come from teams that work together, so it’s crucial to embrace collaborative thinking. We should encourage people to challenge every process and ask "why can’t we do this?" rather than directing our efforts towards generic targets.

The risk is that the visibility of true sustainability becomes lost as it becomes just another target to hit or buzzword to incorporate in business plans. If it fails to engage the minds of people that matter, then continued innovation, progress and long-term impact is likely to suffer, potentially leading to buildings that aren’t as sustainable as they could be.

Too much advice

Another problem is that there are so many organisations giving advice, all producing "best practice" guidance. I sit on a couple of industry advisory forums, which have undertaken to produce a number of best practice documents, but they weren’t aligned. It’s information overload, albeit with the best intentions. We need one set of guidance translated for different groups, such as suppliers or clients. The amount of effort that’s going into this is frustrating, and we have to remember that less is sometimes more.

The rising generation of construction professionals in CM’s sustainability Round Table also identified the problem of over-complicating what should be a straightforward issue. As Mace sustainability director for construction Andrew Kinsey stated, there’s a tendency to measure too many things that don’t add any value to the project, or produce complex reports that the clients don’t read or want. The panellists raised the questions, so are we as an industry just going to say "well done for raising it", or are we going to do something about it? 

Sustainability has been deeply embedded in construction for some time, becoming integral to all aspects of what we do. As a result, we must appreciate that the construction industry is actually performing a lot better than people think – with a considerably smaller carbon footprint than the IT and aviation industries, for instance.

And if we express sustainability performance in terms of carbon emissions per million pounds of turnover, then construction compares favourably with other industries. For example, we recently prepared a bid for a technology provider, responding to a demanding specification that wanted an environmentally efficient building with all the usual features. As part of our tendering process, we did some simple calculations and realised that Balfour Beatty’s carbon footprint – as CO2 per million pounds of turnover – was half of this customer’s worldwide carbon footprint – much of it generated from high-impact server farms, which are perceived as “clean”.

As an industry, we don’t do enough to sell our actual sustainability achievements. We’re all taking big steps on reducing our impacts but we all need to work harder to promote our achievements – no one else will do it for us.

Albert Ree FCIOB is director of sustainability at Balfour Beatty