Latest news & events

Jane Anderson is a Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner and is a member of the Live Labs 2 Commissioning Board. With a focus on decarbonising local roads, Jane brings her expertise in carbon assessment to the programme. As we move into the deployment phase, Jane talks about her involvement and ambitions for Live Labs 2.

I have been working as a Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner in the construction industry since the late 1990s. This involves looking at construction products and producing environmental product declarations. I am also quite heavily involved in international and European standards development and advising on how these can be integrated into work in the UK.

At the moment I am involved in the revision of the RICS (Royal Institution for Chartered Surveyors) Professional Statement on Whole Life Carbon in the Built Environment, which is one of the main approaches used in the UK to undertake building level embodied carbon assessments. We are expanding the statement to cover infrastructure to ensure a more consistent way of doing assessments.

Live Labs 2 - an overall ambition to reduce carbon

Highways is one of the industries where we would like embodied carbon assessments to happen and with my background in standards, I was delighted to be asked to join the Live Labs 2 Commissioning Board.

All the projects in Live Labs 2 have an overall ambition to reduce carbon. My main interest is to make sure that the carbon data is being captured in a consistent way by following the standards. As the projects move into the deployment phase of the programme, I’m looking at the measurements they will use to understand what is happening to carbon.

The data on carbon, how and what is reducing, will be really interesting to see although it will probably take a while before real figures start to come through. The projects are currently baselining what is happening so that they have something to measure against. Consistency across all the projects will potentially allow us to aggregate numbers and determine what has been achieved in total from the Live Labs 2 programme.

Green House Gas Guidance for Local Highways Authorities

The Green House Gas Guidance for Local Highways Authorities, a carbon tool that measures Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, is a separate project developed by ADEPT and Proving Services through the Future Highway Research Group. This is currently being extended to measure Scope 3 emissions – carbon which effectively comes from things that you buy in such as concrete and steel.

Inclusion of all Scope 3 emissions is something that is fundamental to the RICS Professional Statement and the standards that it is based on, EN 15978 and EN 17472. This work is ongoing and I’m hoping that there will be an interaction through Live Labs 2 to review what they’re doing.

When we’re doing a life cycle assessment on buildings and assets, including roads and bridges etc, we would look at it in a different way from, for example, assessing an organisation. We would take into account all the different scopes and break it down into project stages, from the products that are being procured, through to the construction and operation phases, and then what happens at end of life. It’s easier to benchmark infrastructure if you’re looking at it in a project-specific way and this is the approach that I hope will be taken in Live Labs 2.

Centre of Excellence for Materials Decarbonisation

I’m interested to see how the proposed Centre of Excellence for Materials Decarbonisation, which brings together more than one Live Lab, develops. It will be important that it integrates with other industry initiatives on providing and communicating carbon data such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), so that we don’t end up with people doing different things and bringing confusion to the market. The Live Lab that is looking at landscaping and green infrastructure will also be an interesting one from a carbon perspective as lots could happen here – the carbon accounting could be quite complex.

Live Labs 2 is such a positive programme and I’m really pleased to be involved. There’s a lot that happens in construction that’s very siloed and I spend a lot of time trying to make sure it all links up a bit better. The learnings from Live Labs 2 will help to achieve this by testing and implementing news ways of not only reducing carbon emissions, but also how the data on carbon is calculated and reported.

Further information

• For more information on ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK, please look at the Live Labs 2 section on the website

Author

• Find out more about Jane Anderson here