Built was an early proponent of slashing embodied and upfront carbon in buildings, encouraging its clients, supply chain partners and industry peers to raise their ambitions as well. Now there’s a raft of new emerging opportunities driving this leading green builder.
The big question is why does a builder feel the need to drive the sustainability agenda?
According to Joe Karten, head of sustainability and social impact at Built, it’s recognition of the market forces pulling back on overconsumption and the unique position of builders in the supply chain to influence change. “Extreme green building of the future will be unbuilding.”
“In other words, finding opportunities to minimise the use of new materials, prolong the life of existing ones, whilst continuing to create healthy, dynamic new spaces for people to gather.
“We can’t continue to overconsume and our economic systems are reacting to this. The next five to 10 years will be driven by solving how we ratchet back per capita consumption and resource use.
“It’s a shift from the cycle of knocking down and rebuilding to refurbishing and breathing new life into existing buildings and reusing the resources locked inside them.”
Joe Karten
“Extreme green building of the future will be unbuilding…we can’t continue to overconsume, and our economic systems are reacting to this. The next five to 10 years will be driven by solving how we ratchet back per capita consumption and resource use”
Reflecting on his decade in the role at Built, Karten says, “we’re having very different conversations now than we did years ago.
“The breadth of what we mean by sustainability has expanded well beyond operational efficiency.
“Sustainable procurement to direct our spend towards low carbon materials, social enterprises and Indigenous-owned businesses is a key focus along with a heightened awareness of how we design and build spaces that promote health and wellbeing.”
That’s where Karten says Built has moved into a leadership role due to the unique position builders have in the supply chain to influence key decisions at the right inflection points of the development lifecycle.
“Our clients hired us to deliver a 5 Star Green Star rating, and we would find a way to uplift that to 6 Star. That catalysed a shift in mindset to collaborate and find pathways to higher ratings by setting up and tracking stretch targets alongside the contract targets. In most cases, it resulted in the higher ratings being achieved.
“We’re now seen as leaders in the space with our clients because we understand how to achieve their sustainability goals and extend them wherever possible. Working with Atlassian and Dexus is a great example.”
Leading decarbonisation in practice
Enter national sustainability manager Clare Gallagher, who has herself notched up six years at Built and has been instrumental in the work on the Atlassian headquarters in Sydney, which will be the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower.
“Atlassian came to us with an ambition for a whole range of sustainability targets like delivering with 50 per cent less embodied carbon than a conventionally built tower, which had never been achieved before on a new commercial office and asked us, ‘how can we do this?’”
“To get to a 50 per cent reduction, we’ve done a lot of analysis and scenario testing, reviewing both the design and material selections. Beyond that, we had to define how to benchmark and report on upfront embodied carbon when there are no local conventions, which took us time.
“We want to be transparent with industry which led us to write a report ‘Taking Action on Upfront Carbon’ and share the data from our previous projects so we can increase industry knowledge on upfront embodied carbon and encourage others to share their data too.”
Built plans to publish an update to its case study work this year. This will include more data to better align with the evolving standards, in order to enable it to continue to be a relevant and useful resource.
In addition to reducing upfront carbon, Built has also led the charge in the electrification of 12 buildings to date spread across Australia, and in sectors as diverse as residential, office, civic and health, so they can be powered by 100 per cent renewable electricity from day one.
“We’ve seen many clients that as a business have set net zero targets,” says Karten, “and we’ve been able to say to them, we can help you electrify your project to achieve that in the future.”
The new Phive centre in Parramatta is one such example.
Built has also delivered of Australia’s first fully electric private hospital in Sunshine, Victoria for Australian Unity.
— Case Study
PHIVE Parramatta
Phive, at 5 Parramatta Square, Parramatta, is a six-storey new library and cultural centre Built completed for Parramatta City Council.
The target: 6 Star Green Star, 100 per cent electric, climate resilient building, powered by a renewable power purchase agreement.
When Built won the job from 70 per cent tender, the first directions to the consultant design team were to remove the chillers, cooling towers and gas boilers from the design and replace them with a variable refrigerant flow system — a large split system that provides heating and cooling for the building — and change the façade design to introduce natural ventilation for around 60 per cent of the floor area that could be deployed for around 60 per cent of the year.
The natural ventilation saves a calculated 35 per cent of the overall energy usage of the building, while the deletion of cooling towers saves around 80 per cent of potable water usage.
Hot water was removed from the building in all areas aside from end-of-trip shower facilities.
According to Karten it was not a case of convincing the client and design team to compromise and change their minds, but of working together with them to improve sustainability solutions that complement their vision.
Photo: Brett Boardman
Extracting value from existing buildings
Together Karten, Gallagher and their team are challenging the linear economy and advocating for circular and sustainable systems change. At the top of the value scale is preserving our existing structures.
“Every time we knock down a building, we waste resources and subtract value within the embodied carbon that is locked away in that structure. We miss a critical opportunity to vastly reduce the carbon emissions associated with this industry,” Karten says.
Gallagher notes, “in your everyday life, it may seem easier to just go out and buy everything new.
“There’s been that attitude towards buildings with this idea you can’t make an older building into a 6 Star Green Star building or achieve 5+ Star NABERS Energy without demolishing it and starting again.”
But the success of the regeneration of the two heritage buildings at Clarence Street in Sydney for the company’s new headquarters points to the value uplift that some creative application can achieve.
The two industrial buildings were derelict and out of use for decades before being reimagined by Built into Sub Station No.164 a boutique 6 Star Green Star and WELL Health Safety rated building.
“The texture of the original heritage buildings and layers of history they capture remain put together with the newest kind of office design and really high quality, high performance services.
“And so you have this beautiful celebration of the old but with the really strong performance and functionality of new design, but they have been carefully woven into a high performance office space, Gallagher says.
“The innovative form of the new extension is a celebration of creativity in architecture and high quality construction.
“And beyond all this, we have all the invisible decisions and elements that make it a truly healthy and sustainable place. This is a space constructed with careful consideration of materials, nature, people, health and efficiency.”
Far from seeing refurbishment as a constraint that bars the opportunity of creativity, architects are starting to see the layers of interest in heritage buildings. “I think that sort of shiny, new, everything kind of the same, gets kind of bland,” Gallagher says.
But Karten and Gallagher also point out that a building doesn’t just need to have heritage significance to be reused, citing that 85 per cent of the buildings that will exist in developed nations by 2050 have already been built.
“We have an opportunity to ensure these [existing] buildings and the materials within them have more than one life. That they can be reused or repurposed indefinitely,” says Karten.
“There are so many buildings out there reaching the presumed ‘end’ of their current life whose embodied carbon could be honoured through a clever, intentional and respectful retrofit and refurbishment.”
An example of this is the commercial office Built recently completed at 637 Flinders Street in Melbourne.
The project, for Artifex Property Group, was scoped to retain and reuse most of the existing structure. Compared with a knock down rebuild, this achieved an 80 per cent reduction in embodied carbon.
Thinking on materials needs a reboot
Addressing the carbon challenge is not just about decarbonising, electrifying and refurbishing, it’s also about switching materials and circularity.
To underscore this, Karten points out that the construction industry uses around 50 per cent of the raw materials that are mined and processed globally.
According to Karten the cement industry sees the writing on the wall and has been working on decarbonisation for a decade now. The solutions are wild and varied: mixing algae with concrete, designing concrete to be modular to allow for deconstruction and reuse at end of life.
“In the future the materials stored in buildings will be valued as a commodity, we’ll use materials passports to ‘map’ which materials are where in a building and how much they’re worth, so that a building can be dismantled or deconstructed”
Clare Gallagher
There’s also switching materials altogether: moving into mass timber, bamboo, hemp fibre as alternatives.
Karten and Gallagher both agree the biggest opportunity with materials is reaching circularity where materials are designed, used, reused and repurposed, ideally retaining or increasing their value.
“In the future the materials stored in buildings will be valued as a commodity,” says Gallagher, “we’ll use materials passports to ‘map’ which materials are where in a building and how much they’re worth, so that a building can be dismantled or deconstructed, and the materials reused instead of demolished at end of life.”
“It’s in line with a Dutch concept of seeing buildings as “materials banks” holding stockpiles of valuable, high quality materials that easily can be taken apart and reused.”
Built has been working with international experts and a local “coalition of the willing” to explore and drive some momentum in circularity practice and has now released a report “Demystifying the Circular Economy” to share with the industry.
“Ultimately, the fallout from overconsumption will lead us to a path of circularity from material use to reuse of whole buildings and appreciating their value,” says Karten. “Companies that don’t change their view on this risk becoming obsolete in the future.”
For more information, visit https://www.built.com.au/ or read Built’s latest reports:
- Taking Action on Embodied Carbon
- Creating a Net Zero Operation Plan
- Demystifying the Circular Economy” + video
