The Building Sustainably Podcast: Best of Series 2

Foreign. Welcome to the Building Sustainably podcast by rps. Sustainable, resilient development demands a new approach to how we plan, design and build. We invite you to join us as we explore real life case studies and offer practical guidance. Here's your hosts, Ben, Emily and James. We talked about Birmingham a little bit, but you operate across the whole of the uk, so do you see that value of engaging with the local population, the local workforce, as being a key part of your sort of successful delivery of your projects? Yep, absolutely. As an architect, it's not my area of expertise, but we have a lot of good examples of what we're doing. So in Hove we've got an art installation, a massive mural that's being produced out there using local artists. We've got collaborations with institutions like Glasgow School of Arts, we're working with and we hope to further work with charities in Birmingham on our Stony out project. I think it's really important because load of projects, Mode of neighbourhoods, they're not dropped into a city and they're not islands or compounds, they're deep rooted in that local area and the local context we employ from the local area. We need people to work within our buildings that know the area, they know all the good places to go, they, they can speak to our residents and tell them about a good restaurant around the corner. They're deeply embedded in it, so it works with the business strategy as well. So yeah, it's incredibly important. Okay, just moving on from that then. So in terms of comparing or comparing yourself against peers and alternative developers, what sort of benchmarks or accreditations and Mode are working towards on their projects because you want to be able to demonstrate the good work that you're doing on your development. So what sort of accreditations are you focusing on? Carbon aside, we use certifications to demonstrate the performance of our schemes. We're already doing quite a lot. It's difficult without certification to demonstrate that and for it to be legible and transparent. So we use on our PBSA our student schemes, on our co living schemes we use Briam. So part of that BRE suite of certifications and we target pream excellence across all of those projects. For our residential, so our build to rent schemes we use home quality mark and we target four star, so they're both part of that same BRE family that's focusing more on sustainability aspects. We also use Fitwell which has a bit more of health being focus and it works quite well in terms of operations. So it assesses, you have to redo it over three years and it assesses how we're operating our buildings. So we target 3 star with fitwell as well. We're fortunate to because of how we've been pioneering Fitwell in this country. It's US certification because of all the hard work we've been doing it and the successes we've had across our projects. We've been invited to what they call the Fit World Champion status as well within the last year. Yeah. We use those certifications to demonstrate our performance in esg. The next point I wanted just to cover was you touched on it earlier, but in terms of you're in the unique opportunity as being the operator that you have access to the people that ultimately occupy your buildings and your residence. So again, you can capture that data and you talked about how you're capturing that data with residents, feeding that back into designs. But does that engagement with your residents impact or influence your ESG strategy? Yes, it does. Yeah. So we are routinely pushing out surveys. We don't want to give the residents survey fatigue, you don't want to be doing too many. But we do push out surveys to understand what the priorities are for our residents. Some of the metrics we've heard is 90% of residents say that their living environment impacts their well being. Absolutely true. So what we've been trying to design into our buildings is just good architecture really. So it's good levels of light, biophilia in the spaces. So views of natural spaces, external foliage, these green spaces all helps mental health and wellbeing. We've had 70% value the community and 77% willing to pay a premium for higher quality amenities. The amenities that we put in our spaces are absolutely amazing. They could be private dining rooms on upper levels that have got city lounge spaces with them. Cinema rooms we have particularly following Covid and working from home or we put in really generous co working spaces now. So this is like the equivalent of going into your grade A office scheme. We have those spaces within our buildings now. So a residential have to work from home in their apartment. They can have that clean separation between where they want to live and where they want to work. So they can go downstairs, they can go to the co working space, they leave their monitors down there, the keyboards and they can take up their space work alongside the wider community. And some of residents even run businesses out of our buildings. So touching on pre application and thinking about the lifecycle of projects, can you share your views on what are some of the best practices or strategies if you're taking a project from its conception through what are some Things that people leading projects should be thinking about from those very early days throughout what's good look like. Our advice since biodiversity net gain became a thing is that it's really important to start early. You really need to think about the ecological baseline and measurement very early on to get an idea of what the requirements will be. And I think it's also really important that the ecologists and the landscape architects and the hydrologists looking at surface water and the surface water management all work together, those sort of integrated designs, much more functional, much more pleasing to the eye and deliver all of the sort of integrated outputs and a much more synergistic way, so you can make the space on developments work a lot harder for you, so you get more bang for your buck, as it were. And I think it's really important to really design with a view to what's in the biodiversity net gain metric. So my advice to clients is for that design process to always have their metric in your back pocket, metaphorically, so that you know what the baseline is, you know what you've got to hit in terms of the 10% uplift, and if you start with that on the front foot, then you're much more likely to get there in the end. It's really hard to retrofit BNG into a design where it's not being considered halfway around. Yeah. And as far as engaging with the people side of a project and the stakeholder engagement, how important is our conversations early with planning department of the local authority, with neighbours, with potential residents or occupants of a structure? Where do they come in? Well, I think it's really important for a project in any case, but I think certainly my experience on sites where there is some existing ecological interest or concerns, it's really important to take a local authority with you on the design process so that they can see how the design is evolving, to consider the constraints and opportunities for the site and really in the consultation with other stakeholders, the public, the community, it's really important that you can demonstrate that process has taken place and the design reflects the site. It's not just being plonked on as a standard design. And there are references to the local context in terms of ecology and other aspects. Yeah, okay, that makes more sense. Thinking about getting these things off the ground, no pun intended. Are there any incentives or grants in the industry right now that will support including that, or is it really left to the project to find the funding and meet the BNG requirement? It really is built into the projects now. It's a requirement and so developers need to find a way to be able to finance both the surveys and the assessment evaluation, but also the design and the delivery and some of that can be quite expensive. It depends on the project type and the local context. Green roofs are not necessarily cheap, especially if you buy them off the shelf and you want, especially if you want particularly Biodiverse One or you want something that's a little bit specialist, then you can actually find that the cost for those are really quite large and they're a real consideration in terms of the overall build. So again, it's really important to have an understanding of that early on, so it can be built in. But there are some opportunities as well, and certainly being engaged a number of times now in London in particular, where the assessment and the need for biodiversity net gain is pretty much nil because it's a complete hard standing and existing building. So there's no need for uplift, but there is space for green roof. And so there's a real opportunity there to generate extra biodiversity net gain units for a site which are in excess of the requirement for that particular development. So clients who have a portfolio of projects coming forwards, they can bank those to use for their other projects and that saves them time and money and heartache and risk in terms of other projects where you might struggle to find off site opportunities. If you can't deliver them on site, you may need to buy biodiversity units. And that market is a free market at the moment and it's very much led by demand and so the prices can vary quite a lot. So being able to generate your own biodiversity units as a client is really a real positive. Actually, if you take a section of concrete that by weight, the main ingredients are aggregate and sand and water, but the material that binds it all together and makes it hard is called cement. And it's the cement that's responsible for probably 80 to 90% of the embodied carbon footprint in a section of concrete. And the reason why cement has such a high footprint is because it's very energy intensive. So to make cement in this part of the world, you take limestone, you heat it to 1400 degrees centigrade and that takes a lot of energy, so it's very energy intensive. So you can think of the emissions from traditionally that's been fossil fuel based energy. Plus when the limestone breaks down, there's what they call process emissions. So that's actually release of carbon dioxide from the chemical process itself. Because this limestone is a calcium carbonate, this is it. So you've got a lot of CO2 coming out the Stack coming out, the endpoint of the cement kilns. So that's where the pain is felt in terms of carbon footprint and that's really the big challenge. So the cement companies themselves, they've switched to alternative fuels, they've used a lot of energy efficiency, they're beginning to use renewable energy where they can. But there's still the process emissions, which is about two thirds of the carbon emissions from cement production. That's the big challenge for that sector. So that's the origin of the big footprint of concrete in the cement. Yeah, that's an interesting clarification. I think for many, the layman may not appreciate that concrete and cement are two different things. Concrete is the finished product, cement being, as you say, the binder that holds it all together. But the two are not interchangeable in the sense of what they actually are. So that brings us to we've got to solve the cement challenge in concrete and where are the innovations coming from? What are we seeing? Is there anything clever that's going to save the day or is it down to a reduction in just general application? I suppose the tried and trusted way to reduce carbon and concrete up to now, and it's been for several decades, it's gone back probably over the last century, has been to replace some of the cement, some of the high energy material with oil. Their products and the two main ones that have been used, they're byproducts of iron ore smelting. So you have something called blast furnace slag, which is a byproduct from iron ore smelting and that can be ground down. So it's called GGBs, ground granulated blast furnace slag, which has very good cementitious qualities. So at the moment, across the UK and Ireland, if you ask for low carbon concrete, you'll get a combination of Portland cement, traditional cement and GGBs. That's one of the go to products at the moment. The other go to product for low carbon concrete is what they call pfa, so pulverized fly ash. And that is a residue from coal fired energy production. So coal fired power plants. So it's readily available. It's like a circular economy solution. And that also you can mix some of that in with your concrete and reduce the amount of cement used. So those techniques are tried and trusted. They result in very durable concrete products. The difficulty with those techniques and those solutions is they rely on maybe unsustainable industries themselves. From an engineer's perspective as well, what are the key carbon contributors that you have been seeing within Industrial buildings or within industrial and logistics as well that go towards this. So we've looked at a number of different types of logistics facilities and obviously there are different, as we know now, industrial and logistics, there's all shapes and sizes of types of buildings and they have become quite complex. So we have, as Rachel's mentioned, using sort of Rick's guidance, assessed a typical UK developer based build specifications. So, you know, a typical 18 metre clear height facility with the usual external yards. So by taking that 60 year reference study period and looking at the modules that Rachel's discussed, typical breakdown for an industrial facility, we're seeing carbon footprints of around about 750kg of CO2 per square meter. So that's assuming a 60 year reference study period and typically 55% of that figure is associated with the upfront embodied carbon, so module A and just over 40, 45% associated with in use or operational carbon. So both upfront and operational in use are big contributors when considering a 60 year reference study period. If we look at the embodied carbon upfront and module A, it's I guess no surprise that concrete is the biggest contributor to that. If you think raw industrial logistics, there's a vast amount of concrete associated with what can be fairly thick ground floor concrete floors, there's the external yards and then there's obviously the concrete associated with foundations and the floors, particularly if there's mezzanine floors. So concrete contributes about 30% of the footprint embodied carbon in module A. So really the focus has to be on looking at how we either reduce and or specify lower carbon concretes if we're to make any impact on industrial and logistics facilities. So it's key thing. The steel frame typically accounts for around about 20%. So again, looking at how we can reduce steel in terms of its material quantities or look at different ways of manufacturing, we know most of steel that we get at the moment is through the basic pulch and furnace process. And if we looked at electric art furnace processes for example, that would play a significant reduction in the carbon footprint of steel. So I think steel and concrete will still have a big part to play in industrial and logistics facilities. It's how we reduce the use and bait the embodied carbon less in moving forwards. So the modular approach that Rachel's talked about is really important in identifying hotspots within the buildings and how we can target and reduce and prioritize what materials we look at. So I've talked about the concrete and steel. I guess it's no surprise that the cladding systems, so the walls and the roof, curtain, the curtain, walls, et cetera, they contribute around about 16%. So the three key things, concrete, steel and cladding, which are all things we know we can look at and start to look at alternative materials. It's worth mentioning with the collaboration and the materials kind of aspect, you know, what one discipline does, another discipline has to account for. So you have to talk an awful lot with each other when you're making changes. Sustainable design will in some respects only take you so far. A lot of it, as John said, is tied up with the big carbon hitters, concrete and steel. And we are of course at mercy on the availability of those materials. So unless our industry actually makes some significant changes to how they produce these materials, you are not going to get a lower embodied carbon figure. Yeah, it's a good point, Rach. I think we need to consider where we get our materials from because obviously transportation plays a huge part in terms of carbon footprint. So we've talked about steel and concrete. You and I have discussed glulam before and how this might make steel. I think it's an option to look at, but we know, as you've mentioned, that you know there's no local UK mass production of Glulam which could serve the logistics industry. So there are examples of industrial buildings with Glulam. They're supplied generally by and all the core Austrian companies. So we need to consider the impact of how those materials are manufactured and transported to the UK as well as obviously their front embodied car. We developed the best approaches and obviously your takeaways from what's been going on with previous projects or case law that is emerged. Stay informed about emerging guidance along with the NPPF framework bringing to it and the update that's going to come through for it. Would there be any other sort of top highlights that we may have already discussed and sort of gone into detail? But as before, you go into the sequential test, what would be the hard hitting points that you would do beforehand? Make sure there's collaboration going on and that you're not losing or deferring the preparation of the test between different disciplines, getting the definition of the project right so that everybody agrees what it is and what, as Jonathan said about grid connections, or maybe you've got a medical center or something, something that's unique, potentially unique, that defines your project and that defines the search area. Agree that search area, then it becomes kind of a two part assessment from our point of view as flood risk engineers, we would look at comparing that site to all of the other potential alternatives and then you Might end up with a big long list of 200 sites or whatever. Can you come, I don't know, 12th in that big long list? And then, as we said earlier about is it reasonable to include all of that 200? And then you look at, maybe the size doesn't work, in which case your list then goes down to 50 perhaps, and then you look at other things such as your uniqueness, and then that might rule out a few others. And then it's really over to the planners and the clients to then look at what sites remain and then do the assessment of what's available, what's reasonably available, and then that gets you down to that really short list of the sequentially preferable or not sites. So as long as it's done rigorously and in the methodology of the sequential test with case law behind it, then that's where you really need to go. I would say I would be mindful of the sequential test at the due diligence stage. If you're looking at a new site, be mindful that if you are looking at a site, that this may need to be applied and an awareness that you don't want to get down the track and find that you still need to apply this. And at that point, when you've invested a significant amount of funds into developing a concept of the site, a layout and everything else, that you need to undertake this sequential test. And at that point you establish that there is in fact a reasonably available site and you could effectively be challenged upon it. So that initial awareness, I would say as part of this podcast, we're aware that the sequential test is becoming more of a hot topic, then the scrutiny being applied to it is at the forefront. So for any developers moving forward with a site, as I say, an awareness that this test may be required and having that ready is, I think, the best advice. I think the key take home is wind farms and birds is all about location, location, location. There are risks, but we can work with those risks through mitigation and careful planning. We need to increase our understanding. But when we do collect data, we need to then use that data. Data shouldn't just be collected and put on a shelf and less than a corner. We need to use it and understand it and have a calm, rational, pragmatic approach. And all parties need to work together, developers and regulators. We're all aware that the regulators have been squeezed and it's a lot of pressure on them. But if we are to fight climate change, and we've seen recently some real sort of negative impacts in Spain from climate change. We see gradual creep in climate change, as I say, through egrets and warmer species moving north in the uk. So there's continual change. There's no such thing as a set baseline. But yeah, we need to take a pragmatic approach and try and develop in harmony without being too much of a pun. But yeah, that's what we need to do. We need to move forward sensibly on that. Yeah. And if onshore and offshore wind is going to be a key part of our energy strategy moving forward, which it is, then it's important that we do strike that balance between that need and that development and obviously keeping the whole of the natural world, but in particular birds protected and having that developing stream of data available to us, as long as we analyze it correctly, that's invaluable and making sure that we can continue to move forward in the sector. Yes, pretty much the case. Where would you recommend starting if you are either in a corporate role charged with drafting an ESG strategy, or potentially career wise, looking to make a transition into esg? Some suggestions or advice on where to start? Potentially two there, what about careers and what about if you've got the job already, but you need to draft the strategy, so tackle that how you will. Let's start with people that want to actually deliver ESG strategies. So as an organization, where do you start? I think more often than not, my advice usually is let's start from where you are. Let's understand, you know, what you got as a baseline position and then understand where you want to go from there and then probably identify where the gaps are, what are the key focus areas. Okay. But beyond that, I always like to start with why. And the reason for that is that if you're doing ESG just for the purpose of responding to CR pressures, you know, or clients, you know, request, and it's not part of an intrinsic desire and recognition of a social purpose. It's going to fall apart very quickly, it's going to become a burden because it doesn't get properly integrated into the DNA of an organization. So understanding your why and how that marries with an ESG strategy is really important, you know, so we would probably typically start with something like a vision design workshop to trash that out, set a very clear ambition, you know, and then we then go on to the gap analysis, materiality assessments and then the likes of it. For someone who wants to get involved in ESG as a career, again, I'll ask you why, Why? Why would you want to do it, you know, and you know, it's, it's important like, like, like you mentioned, James, you know, to have the right passion and interest in any career, you know, in order to flourish, in order to thrive, you know, in order to be able to feel significant, you know, and make any sort of reasonable impact or contribution in the list. And if, if you're really interested in this, you, you need to find mentors, find people that you can tap on the shoulders that can give you a bit of a hand holding. All right, so they're mentors, they're coaches. And personally, as an individual, you've got to immense yourself in the trends, right? What' industry or esg, what are the policies, the direction of travel, you know, what are the pinch points for organization? What is the problem and challenge we are trying to solve? It might mean going to get a specialist master's degree in one of the related subjects. For example, it might be joining a professional body like IIMA Institute, Environmental Management and Assessments or any other related professional bodies in the build sector, you know, and, you know, getting yourself immersed in that subject matter. There are lots of free webinars and seminars you could do to upskill your knowledge as well. Yeah, okay. Some great advice there. You touched on earlier companies, organizations starting with their why and then building that into the DNA of their business. And I'd like to expand on that a bit more in terms of how have you seen businesses or what have you seen? Hopefully where businesses have done it well and got that true connection or true integration of ESG and the business's DNA. Put it a different way. Where does it go well and where does it not go well? So that's a lot of good question as well. And going a bit more into more detail there as well. I think where it doesn't go well is particularly where it becomes a tick boxing exercise and you find that the organization is basically trying to respond to compliance requirements as a minimum. So what is the list we can do to make this stuff disappear? I just want to be in the black. I don't want to get in the red. It basically takes all the joy out of it. It becomes an agile, strenuous exercise. It becomes burdensome. There's a lot of pushback on lots of great ideas and innovation and it just comes down to production ground and it just makes it lackluster and stuff that people don't want to engage with you. So you like engagement, you like buy in, you know, and it will end up on the shelf gathering dust till the next season where you need to update the Checklist. So that fails clearly and it doesn't do what it needs to do. An example where it is really successful is where, you know, an ESG strategy is fully integrated into a business's operation. So basically it's there, but it's not there. Just effortless. It's effortless. It doesn't constitute an additional administrative burden or challenge for project managers, for operation unit leaders, for program managers, for various engineers, consultants or employees. It's seamlessly introduced as part of the bottom line, you know, and in order to do that, you know, it can't just be top down, it's got to have the top down and the bottom up approach. There's got to be a buy in, there's got to be an engagement from all relevant stakeholders, which is why you've got to start with the why you've got to engage all relevant stakeholders. You've got to carry everybody along in that process, you know, you've got to identify the things that matter the most to you. Not just you as a decision maker, but to the interested parties, to the delivery parties, to funders, to your entire value chain, you know, as a whole, you know, and then you create a strategy, a vision that actually resonates with everyone. When you've got that sense of ownership and buy in, you know, and it feeds into your organizational philosophy, your ambition, your actual core and DNA, effectively, it becomes who you are. There's a lot of team ethos around, bring things together. You work your teams, you don't work in the same place necessarily. Having said that, the construction sector is a very wide sector and a lot of the debate I've read in the press and everything always defaults to baseline skills, bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters, whatever, which are fantastic jobs. And, you know, bricklayer can earn 50,000 a year very easily, very good bricklayer. But equally, there's masses of jobs around that we also need to recruit into, you know, whether it be building engineers or whether it be people working in the regulatory side, building control with the planning, all those areas. So there's lots of jobs, it's extremely inclusive. And the other thing I'd say, you know, about our sector is that it's the one industry I know of where there's no stobbishness attached to it. If you are good at your job and you work hard, whatever your background, wherever you came from, whatever you want to go, you can go there. It's the art of the possible. And there are many people who started this industry at 16 years old who are now Chief executive and that's one of the few industries where that that applies. So we've got an exciting proposition to do. I'm personally going to be chairing Birmingham housing week for 2025 and we'll be holding up in November. And it's all about me, about getting those skilled jobs understood by people and then connecting them to the right training and then connecting them to the right employer. And it's as simple as that. So it's that closing the gap between the fact that I talk to young people who say they'd love to get into construct. I can't get in, can't find a route in, talk to employees, just say we'd love to take on young people, but I can't find any. And there's something in the middle of all that that says we have an opportunity to give people a fantastic career and deliver the homes and the other buildings and the infrastructure and things that we need desperately to grow UK plc. So I'm also personally responsible in 2008 for launching the Get Britain Building campaign. That had a big skills element to that and it still carries on. And I've also talked about a program called I Built it, which is all about. That is about getting people in and connecting people back to the job. So we'll see space. But my view is we've got a mayor in, Richard Parker for the West Midlands, who's very, very keen on housing and skills. He likes buses as well. But I'm better at housing skills. And by connecting those things up, we have a real opportunity, particularly for those disadvantaged communities in this area where we've seen youth unemployment at levels such fleeingly unacceptable. Given that we've got a level of opportunity. We've got. So opportunity, not a threat, let's get on with it is my view. That's great. Yeah, it's certainly something that RPS really focus on that bringing. Whether it be apprentices or graduates or bringing them into the team early on and just showing them what the industry has to offer. And as you say, it's so wide ranging that there's certainly something for anyone and everyone, I think. And I think that's been a really interesting discussion and just wanted to sort of wrap up and see if there was anything in particular, just in terms of key takeaways, if there was people listening to this, those key takeaways that people want to. You want people to take away and really think about. Thank you. So I'll flip back, if I may, to the work we do in terms of future homes. It's all about providing the data and the insights to allow evidence based decision making. So I think we've been led too often by misinformation by people not doing the proper gathering of evidence to make decisions. So we aim to put that right and in doing so to avoid unintended consequences. So again, our industry over the years has been littered with unintended consequences. So really important that we avoid those wherever possible. And it's also really important that we embrace the challenges that I mentioned right at the outset of this discussion and deal with them head on. You know, whether that be climate change, whether it be building safety, clearly the opportunities around skilled employment we just talked about are fantastic. And if we can connect those things up, we create better places for everybody and that in that impacts, you know, aren't everything crime, everything is related to whether people feel included, whether they feel works for them. It's my submission that if they spend a good day working in our industry, they'll be too tired to commit crime. It is a world full of opportunity for us still and the fact is this industry can lead UK plc. One of the reasons I started Get Britain building back in 2008, a big crash was the multiplier effect of construction. That says for every pound that you invest you get a 2 pound 84 return. And that's a phenomenal return. And it's because principally we make the stuff here. About 80% of went into Project 80 and the Keep Mo site were made in the UK. There's no other industry that can. Quite low statistics are here. And in fact on the Keymote site for instance, the bricks came six miles and the blocks came 18 months. We should be very proud of those statistics given that we're about to spend Christmas opening presents that almost all will have been made in China. Any construction project, it's got the opportunity to enhance that local economy, isn't it? Whether it be everything from local manufacturers all the way down to the cafe that's down the road that's going to have additional people wanting a builder's breakfast. You know, it all adds to investment. The Building Sustainably podcast is brought to you by rps. To find out more about RPS and how we can help you deliver future ready development, visit rpsgroup.com and then search for the Building Sustainably podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts, make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at rps, thanks for listening.