Greencore Homes is leading the way in delivering low carbon housing, can you tell me a bit about your journey so far?
We are an SME housebuilder with ambitious plans to scale up delivery and aims to develop 10,000 new, net zero carbon homes by 2035. This is being made possible with the support and financial backing of M&G.
How are you responding to the environmental context in the housing sector right now?
Simply put, we are developing better than net zero homes and climate positive places. This means building to higher standards than the minimum required by Building Regulations. We go further by achieving a net zero carbon balance in operational energy.
Our focus is on the co-benefits of our unique home design, creating the heathiest possible internal environment for the occupants living in our homes. Our high standards of insulation and thermal performance are coupled with well-ventilated spaces for internal comfort, with improved air quality too. We provide healthy-living environments, enhancing people’s wellbeing.
Greencore approaches placemaking by designing landscape-led schemes with publicly accessible, natural green spaces for health and wellbeing. This is one of our guiding principles – considered throughout the design process. Our approach is to ensure developments are sensitive to ecology and the natural environment, throughout their life cycle. This allows us to create new communities and places where people can live low-carbon, healthy and active lives.
What are your biggest practical challenges?
One of the biggest is the delays and drawn-out process of securing planning consent on a new site. We can sometimes experience questions from local planning authorities related to our modern methods of construction and choice of materials, as these are viewed as contemporary design that does not fit the local vernacular.
We see that our role as a sustainable housebuilder is to raise awareness to the benefits of our approach to sustainable construction, promoting the importance of addressing the climate emergency through the design of our homes. Embodied carbon is seldom a consideration in planning policy, but we are working to shift perceptions through positive engagement and collaboration with our LPA partners.
You are one of our Madaster Pioneers, how is it going?
We have been a Madaster Pioneer for around four months now. During that time our main focus has been on getting team members set up and established using the platform, uploading technical drawings of our homes and building our materials data. We are currently using the platform to assess a live site with 42 dwellings in Milton Heights in Oxfordshire. So far, we are very pleased with the results as it’s been a very interesting process.
How will the platform support your day-to-day operations?
We want transparency of our data on the embodied carbon impact of all the materials and products we are specifying in our homes. We hope Madaster will provide us with this through its Materials Passports, and our assessment of impact can become a part of our business-as-usual approach. The platform also has great potential as a decision-making tool for the business. Once we have successfully developed our databases (work in progress!), we will have the information we need to review specifications in more detail. This will help us analyse where there is potential to make further embodied-carbon reductions.
What value does being part of the Madaster Network bring?
It’s exciting to be involved in something so new, with like-minded industry players. Our interest as a business in Madaster stems from wanting to embed, in our day-to-day, a better understanding of the embodied carbon impact of the homes we are building. As a team, we want to be able to interrogate this data ourselves through design and use that knowledge to inform future decisions on the materials and products we select.
The Madaster network opens up conversations across the industry on a shared issue –that the circularity and embodied-carbon impact of products and materials is not always front and centre in everyone’s minds. By working together, we can achieve more, raise awareness with our value-chain partners and help bring everyone on board so we are working together to minimise the impact of production.
The network also provides an important forum to share experiences, discuss common challenges and consider solutions for those together.
What does circularity mean for you?
Circularity for me is about retaining as many materials as we can in the system, for as long as possible.
Our focus at Greencore is on the upfront embodied carbon of our product: our homes. We use timber frame structures, our BIOND wall panel, and timber cladding facades – natural materials that help minimise our embodied-carbon impact. Being able to disassemble these elements and other materials and products specified in our homes, at the end of their useful life, is another important consideration.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss how Madaster can support your decarbonisation goals.
