By Cliff Kinch, Area Director, Morgan Sindall – South
At Morgan Sindall, perpetuating sustainability is part of our DNA. Not only is it within our vision; it underpins our purpose too. A purpose that drives us to enhance the communities in which we all live, learn, work, play, care and protect.
Climate change is one of the greatest environmental challenges that society has ever faced and it is beyond time for everyone to get involved in building back a better planet for all, now and for future generations. We must take more action, and, in the construction sector, we have a real opportunity to make a significant change.
At Morgan Sindall, we have been tracking our performance and tackling the challenges that face our industry. Since 2016, we have been taking action to reduce all our carbon emissions, achieving an A rating for scope 3 emission in 2020 from the Carbon Disclosure Project (one of the few companies to achieve this globally) and pledging to have achieved Net Zero for our own operations by 2030, at the latest.
This, however, has limited material impact on our purpose to enhance communities, which is why we created our “Decarbonising Communities” strategy in 2021 – a framework for collaboration, inclusion, and alignment of purpose amongst our stakeholders, to help respond to the climate challenge we face. Fundamentally, it is about leaving a climate positive impact on the environment.
Our strategy is focused on reducing asset-related embodied and operational carbon, as well as that within our own organisation, enabling our business to reduce reliance on non-renewable natural resources. It consists of 6 key areas of implementation that will empower all our stakeholders to reduce carbon.
One key area of implementation focuses on the assets we deliver, and to help us measure the impact of these assets, we have developed a specialist tool, CarboniCa. This is our unique carbon calculator, which measures whole life carbon emissions at a building’s design, construction, and entire life cycle. Since its launch in 2021, we’ve been able to save thousands of tonnes of carbon being emitted into the atmosphere. CarboniCa highlights elements of the building that will result in higher emissions and suggests lower carbon alternatives for the client, designers, and our own supply chain. This ensures that considered, environmentally friendly decisions can be made, based on meaningful and robust data. It helps our customers to make informed decisions based on transparent data, as early as concept stage, and challenges businesses to deliver better carbon outcomes. It is not used in isolation but represents an integrated approach with our social value and whole life cost methodologies.
Here in the Central South, we are already seeing the benefits of its deployment. Spinnaker View is an extra care facility in Gosport, where we have utilised CarboniCa during the design process, influencing the design to make a saving of 324 equivalent tonnes of CO 2 (equating to 120 homes heated annually). Not only was there a significant reduction in embodied carbon, but by utilising alternate products, the construction programme was significantly reduced. Given this success, the same design choices have now been applied to our next project for the same client, thus doubling the benefits.
Spinnaker View Development – Gosport
The use of CarboniCa to date, across multiple Morgan Sindall Construction projects, has meant that we’ve been able to support our clients in working towards achieving their own net zero targets, upskilling and empowering them to make environmentally friendly decisions.
Together we are stronger and, by working collaboratively with our customers, we are consistently challenging the status quo.
As featured in Central South’s PROSPER Magazine – download the full magazine here.
