It is understanding the full and lasting impact of our design choices and reducing the carbon footprint over the building’s entire lifetime. From cradle to grave.

Two phrases you will often hear are – Embodied Carbon and Operational Carbon. Embodied Carbon is the amount of carbon emitted during the creation of the building and its materials. Operational Carbon is the amount of carbon emitted during the life of the building and maintaining those materials.

The current method for measuring the CO2 impact of each material is through a Life Cycle Assessment using Environmental Product Declarations or EPDs for short. Unfortunately, EPDs assume the study period for a building’s life is only 60 years. This is just 1% of the age of the oldest fired bricks in the world made 6000 years ago and are still here today.

This is incredibly important because durable products with extensive longevity such as clay brick, will prolong the expected life of a building resulting in a lower carbon footprint for every year of use. Not to mention, brick can then go on to be re-used and recycled to live a 2nd and sometimes even a 3rd life, benefitting multiple generations.

We often hear the Brick Industry say clay products last 200+ years, this is 3x longer than EPD’s measure the carbon impact, therefore designers do not receive Life Cycle Assessments reflective of the true life span of their building.

Michelmersh has produced the following ‘Think Longer‘ educational animation to highlight the impact of design choices on the whole-life carbon footprint of our built environment:

Brick is non-toxic and requires little to no maintenance, it’s non-combustible and improves the thermal and acoustic building values, equating to zero operational carbon.

Other building materials need much greater maintenance levels, often reliant upon chemical processes which lead to a considerably higher operational carbon footprint. Many of these non-clay materials will usually require complete replacement several times over a building’s 200-year lifespan, multiplying the Embodied and Operational carbon footprints several times over.

Michelmersh convened a roundtable discussion with RIBA Journal ‘Think longer to build sustainably‘ including influential architects, material suppliers, structural engineers, manufacturers, policy makers, construction teams and educational professors. Please read the full article here:

THINK LONGER TO BUILD SUSTAINABLY

In reality when measuring your building’s design over its true/real-life span, clay brick is one of the least carbon-intensive building materials you can use.

To be truly sustainable, we believe in designing buildings that are both adaptable and multi-generational, so that the environment and our children’s children will benefit from the choices we make today:

Think Longer.

Design for 200 years, not 20.