With the climate emergency more pressing than ever, it is increasingly important that claims about sustainability are both accurate and substantiated. Bennetts Associates director Peter Fisher explains why the practice is on a mission to stamp out exaggerated claims about building performance and has produced a charter to promote data sharing, transparency and truth.
Built environment professionals are increasingly accused of greenwashing, with lofty claims of sustainability often obscuring the reality of a building’s performance. With the Climate Emergency more pressing than ever, it is especially important that sustainability claims are accurate and substantiated.
The inaugural UK Green Building Council campaign was the Campaign for Real Data, which responded to a dearth of good post-occupancy data in the built environment. 16 years later, our industry still fails to gather enough data or verify all narrative-led claims. Even with good intentions it’s easy to inadvertently fall into the trap of greenwashing projects. Generic statements about ‘sustainable this’ and ‘net zero carbon that’ are common, obscuring the work actually being done to improve building performance and making it more difficult for the built environment to benchmark best practice.
At Bennetts Associates we wrote an internal Sustainability PR Charter aimed at promoting transparency and realistic data sharing. This forms part of a wider campaign entitled ‘Tell The Truth: A campaign for honesty in the built environment’, which we recently presented to external parties, including the BCorp Built Environment Network and journalists in the architectural media.
11-21 Canal Reach by Bennetts Associates is the largest and most significant office development to date for King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership. In addition to an embodied carbon assessment, the building has been awarded a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating, exceeding its original target. It is also connected to the King’s Cross District Energy Network, which is powered by 100% renewable energy sources, meaning it will benefit from zero carbon heating, hot water and cooling.
We’d like to encourage others to use the charter. For our industry to progress we need to share realistic data and honest narratives. Inaccurate or overstated claims create unnecessary difficulty for design teams of future projects who may try to repeat the stated performance. Prominent architects have shared upfront carbon numbers that are nigh on impossible for the building type or construction method. Then there are extreme cases, such as the recent coverage of a building described as ‘retained’, when in fact it was demolished and reconstructed save for the retained façade.
Site hoardings proclaim environmental savings measured in gargantuan units: Olympic swimming pools or transatlantic flights. These statements are intended to impress, not to inform. Press releases, too, are awash with adjectives and superlatives, but usually lack meaningful definition. In his brilliantly insightful book, ‘Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air’, the late David MacKay titled the introduction ‘Numbers Not Adjectives’ for a reason.
The twin fears of mistakes and failing to meet the mark often prevent the release of data. But daylight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. Together with the developer Argent, we published the first two LETI (Low Energy Transformation Initiative) embodied declarations for completed buildings. Here, the data is publicly accessible, and believe it or not people do look at it. A mistake was spotted, pointed out to us, and then corrected. The information was improved by it being publicly available – supporting ongoing improvement of our collective push for better buildings.
Located in London’s Bankside, Timber Square by Bennetts Associates meets Landsec’s brief for an exemplar workplace that reflects its own science-based net zero carbon commitments. Through a combination of re-used existing structure and hybrid steel/cross laminate timber structure the upfront carbon is predicted as below 550kgCO2/m2 (A1-5 @ Stage 4). It is currently on target to achieve BREEAM Outstanding, Well Platinum and NABERS 5* minimum. It was the first UK project to complete its NABERS Independent Design Review.
The charter is a short and simple document – only two sides of A4. Critically it doesn’t replace the industry standard ratings systems, rather it signposts standards that are credible and science based. A significant part of the charter is a core set of definitions that serve to guide usage of commonly used terms: energy, operational carbon, upfront and embodied carbon, sustainable, and low carbon. We are far from infallible, but we hope that all of our written and visual outputs will be better and more substantiated as a result. Encouragingly there are moves elsewhere in our industry to improve the veracity of the discourse around sustainability and efficient use of materials.
Net Zero Carbon (NZC) is increasingly ubiquitous yet there is no clear definition of what it means in the built environment. The best current guidelines come from the UKGBC’s energy consumption targets for office buildings, which are science based and relate to the Paris Agreement. There is also some excellent work by LETI, with targets for both operational and embodied carbon across multiple sectors.
These aside, once launched, The UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard will provide the single definition the industry needs. Chaired by David Partridge of Related Argent, it has been convened by cross-industry bodies, including BBP, BRE, the Carbon Trust, CIBSE, IStructE, LETI, RIBA, RICS and UKGBC. The standard will provide the industry with the tools and confidence to robustly measure whether our built assets are net zero carbon in line with current UK climate targets. It will review operational and embodied carbon across multiple sectors, from offices and homes to hotels and theatres. It is currently undergoing a review of evidence, set to be released at the end of this year.
Award programmes in the built environment are also beginning to take actual use and data into account. The Architecture Today Awards for buildings that have stood the test of time have begun to take the use of buildings and ongoing performance into account. RIBA Awards too, have incrementally increased the amount and substance of sustainability data required to be considered.
The NZC Building Standard and the increasing requirement for data in awards submissions will help to fill some of the current gaps in evidence, but we hope that our charter will create better and more substantiated conversations.
We are inviting all Architects Declare signatories, journalists and editors to make the same commitments. Sign up.
Click here to see Bennetts Associates anti-greenwashing charter.
