Carbon Footprinting – UK Brick Industry
Carbon Footprinting has become a standard assessment tool for the calculation and verification of the impact an entity has upon climate change resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG).
The Sustainability WP Committee within the Brick Development Association (BDA) wanted to create a brick manufacturing industry Carbon Footprint to:
- Establish a credible and verified brick manufacturing industry Carbon Footprint
- Aid promotion of the BDA sustainability agenda
- Prevent other bodies generating values from less credible sources.
The Challenge
The project objective was to measure and report a ‘generic’ Carbon Footprint for the UK brick manufacturing industry based on a representative sub set of brickworks, clay types and manufacturing processes/kiln types in order to benchmark these products against others.
Ceram was commissioned to formulate a methodology and procedure for the calculation of a Carbon Footprint, based on the following principles:
- Baseline centred around 2008 data
- Utilisation of 14 representative sites (brickworks) in the UK, previously used to establish the BRE LCA project in 1996/97 (reflection of the multitude of production sites in the UK)
- Inclusion of both combustion and process emissions
- Incorporate generic CO2 emission values for office space and company car/transport data
- Cradle to customer basis.
What Ceram Delivered
A Carbon Footprinting exercise was conducted utilising the following methodologies:
- ISO 14064 framework (for the design, collection, management and reporting of GHG inventories at an organisational level)
- World Resource Institute
- Carbon Trust
- PAS 2050.
In return, the exercise provided a generic Carbon Footprint for this sector, as well as ‘Carbon Impacts’ (Footprints) relating to specific parts of the process:
- Raw materials winning/supply
- Manufacturing process
- Distribution to customer (transport of products to site)
- HQ and company sales/management transport contributions.
Value to the Client
Ceram provided the BDA with a verifiable Carbon Footprint for the UK brick manufacturing sector.
Whilst the data generated was generic and based on a representative subset of the UK brick manufacturing sites, the data and methodology can be used to build upon and generate manufacturing and additional site specific Carbon Footprints.
