Safety and environmental pressures are leading to a wave of innovation in materials development – but what are the barriers to getting new products to site?
Innovation is, of course, desirable in any industry at any time. It enables companies to improve their products or services, thereby better serving their customers and providing a competitive advantage over their peers. The construction sector is no different.
In recent years, however, the industry has come under pressure on two important fronts. In the wake of the June 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster, construction companies have recognised that the products they use need to be as safe as possible – and firms have come under intense pressure from the public and government alike.
Then there is the climate crisis. Construction is an inherently carbon-intensive industry, but much can still be done to lower emissions. Here the pressure comes from all directions, including government, consumers and companies’ own employees, not just in the construction sector but across all industries.
So what new products are coming to market? And what barriers are there to adoption?
“The risk averseness of all players… is driving many back towards traditional approaches”
Peter Caplehorn, CPA
Post-Grenfell legislation requires a step change in terms of product safety, according to Peter Caplehorn, chief executive of the Construction Products Association. “Much product innovation is driven by changes to regulations, so the effects of the Building Safety Act (BSA) are running through the sector,” he says. “Ensuring what you make is thoroughly tested and correctly certified is innovation from where we were seven years
ago.” The new approach also ensures products function as advertised for their intended purpose, he adds. “Any and all products have a new focus on them – that is the reaction of the product sector to the Grenfell disaster,” Caplehorn says.
Speaking off the record, a senior representative of a leading contractor agrees that Grenfell has prompted action, but he is sceptical about whether it is leading to genuine innovation. “At the moment, we are seeing a lot of advances in
making non-combustible versions of common products – like Visqueen cavity trays for high-rise buildings – to meet the new regulations,” the contractor source says. “It’s not very fantastic innovation but essential for the industry.”
The source adds that caution sometimes leads companies to revert to tried-and-tested products and approaches rather than embrace innovation. “The reality we are seeing is that the risk averseness of all players, plus insurance restrictions and the BSA, is driving many [manufacturers] back towards traditional approaches, certainly for anything structural or if it needs a fire certification,” he says.
“You’ll also find a lot of the existing manufacturers are spending more on product testing and fire testing than previously, owing to contractors asking more questions and the advent of the Product Safety Regulator.”
Sustainable innovation
When it comes to addressing climate change, even greater innovation is required. “At the moment we see the trends on decarbonisation either in production methods, the product itself, or contributing to the reduction of carbon in use,” says Caplehorn.
“New factories and processes that use a fraction of the carbon, and reducing carbon in the production of bricks, cement and steel is all underway. Considerable effort [is being made] on using less resources in manufacturing and then, wherever possible, a better effort to recycle or reuse.”
Sometimes, however, new, more sustainable materials can run into difficulties due to the industry being so much more safety conscious following Grenfell.
Simon Corbey, chief executive of the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products, is keen to promote the use of mass timber. But he says that at the moment it can be an uphill struggle. A particular problem is that insurance companies are currently highly wary of timber products. “It’s a nice solution for up to five storeys, but we’ve been looking at the barriers and that generally keeps coming back to insurance,” he says.
“We’ve been working hard with the insurance industry to upskill them on what is a relatively new system. We’ve also got our Mass Timber Insurance Playbook, which basically looks at the insurance conundrum and tries to navigate a route through that. It’s been downloaded about 2,000 times and I feel like it’s made a bit of a difference. Developers, designers and architects need to engage with their insurance providers at an early stage.”
Corbey says that it will take government intervention for products like mass timber to be taken up in a serious way. “Ultimately, what we need is innovation and bravery from the political world to drive forward legislation on things like embodied carbon,” he says. “If we legislated for embodied carbon, we would get a whole raft of more sustainable products.”
“Focusing on just exchanging one material for another is not what gets us to a sustainable future. We need to focus on reusing materials”
Kai Liebetanz, UK Green Building Council
Innovation isn’t just about producing new sustainable materials. It’s also about reducing the carbon footprint of existing and necessary materials as much as possible. Concrete is a prime example. Gareth Wake, a director at the Mineral Products Association responsible for the ready-mixed concrete product group, says there has been “incredible change” in recent years.
“A lot of this work is actually driven by the cement companies themselves,” he says. “They’re seeing it as almost a licence to operate in an industry that is seen as being polluting. At the end of the day, as a society we can’t not use concrete, so we need to find ways to decarbonise it.”
The biggest problem with concrete is cement, which Wake says makes up only 12 per cent of the finished product but accounts for almost all of its embodied carbon. As a result, considerable research is going into finding materials that can replace the cement, either in whole or in part. “If you replace 50 per cent of the cement with another material, you effectively halve its embodied carbon,” says Wake. “We have a lot of very interesting projects going on, but we don’t really know which ones will be scalable.”
Striking a balance
Tim Smith, Tarmac’s senior technical manager for the South East, says that reducing the embodied carbon within new products needs to be balanced with ensuring that they also last for as long as possible. “There is a link between durability and sustainability,” he says. “If you can make a product last longer then you’re avoiding emitting all that carbon that’s involved in replacing it.”
Smith says that it may one day be possible to produce zero-carbon concrete, but a balance needs to struck between a product’s carbon profile and its cost. After all, if a low-carbon product is so expensive that nobody uses it, there won’t be any carbon saving at all.
“At the moment, a lot of this stuff is expensive,” he says. “You would hope that over time, as adoption becomes more widespread, that cost will reduce. But there’s a risk and currently it’s certainly more expensive than standard materials. And so you’ve got this challenge of what a customer is prepared to pay. One of the things that we’re looking at is what a customer would pay per tonne of avoided carbon.”
Others believe that a true leap forward will only come if the industry thinks at a system level. Kai Liebetanz, head of nature at the UK Green Building Council, says the industry needs to think about digital innovation as well as new material.
Most prominently, he says that digital material passports are badly needed to maximise the reuse of products and reduce the need for new materials to be manufactured.
“What we need is a general change of practice and a system-level change,” he says. “Focusing on just exchanging one material for another is not what gets us to a sustainable future. We need to focus on reusing materials. That is the most sustainable that you can do: build as little as possible and reuse everything you have.”
The industry is making significant progress in designing innovative products that are both safer and more environmentally sustainable. However, there are still significant hurdles that need to be overcome if they are to be widely adopted.
