Supplement gives the whole story

This issue of New Steel Construction comes with a free supplement entitled ‘The Whole Story: From Cradle to Grave’ which will help designers make the correct sustainability choices.

Commissioned by the BCSA and Tata Steel, and produced in partnership with United Business Media, the free supplement will broaden the on-going sustainability debate by helping engineers and designers to think about the longer term implications of their choices.

The supplement highlights the shortcomings of most current embodied carbon calculations and encourages a more holistic approach. This means an assessment of the full lifecycle of buildings and materials from cradle to grave, rather than a simplified cradle to gate methodology which ends when materials leave the factory gate.

The simplified method does not provide the whole story and makes no differentiation between fully recyclable materials and those which are destined for the tip after a single use.

An impressive lineup of contributors are included in the supplement, such as Dr Kristian Steele, Senior Consultant at Arup Materials; Chris Trott, Sustainability Engineer and Partner at Foster + Partners; Dr Craig Jones, Senior Associate at carbon reduction consultancy Sustain and Francesca Iliffe, Sustainability Officer at Brighton and Hove Council. The supplement’s foreword has been written by Paul King, Chief Executive of the UK Green Building Council.