Contractors are increasingly asked to report and reduce the carbon in the materials they install, not only the fuel they burn. The research literature is clear about what holds this back.
What the review found
Francesco Pomponi and Alice Moncaster reviewed the evidence on mitigating and reducing embodied carbon in the built environment (Pomponi and Moncaster, Journal of Environmental Management 181, 687–700, 2016). They note that operational energy efficiency has received far more attention than embodied carbon, which is less well researched even though it is needed to find mitigation opportunities. Drawing on several data sources, they identified barriers to measuring and reducing embodied CO₂e in practice. They recommended that governments require better data quality and support a transparent, simplified methodology.
In the UK, PAS 2080:2023 has since given infrastructure a common framework for managing carbon across the value chain. The measurement problem the review describes has not gone away: a carbon management plan is only as good as the quantities and factors behind it.
Where the data comes from on site
On a live project, most of the quantity data already exists. It is on the delivery notes. Each note names a material, a quantity, a date and a supplier. The difficulty is getting those notes into a system before they are lost in a site cabin.
MetricOra's field app lets site teams photograph delivery notes and read them on the phone, offline if needed. When a reviewer approves a note, MetricOra creates an embodied carbon record against the project:
- Material: matched from the note's description. The reviewer can change the match or opt out.
- A1–A3 (product stage): from the library factor, or the supplier's own EPD when one is valid.
- A4 (transport to site): from the actual delivery: tonnes × route distance × the DEFRA HGV tonne-kilometre factor for the date.
Materials with no library factor, and quantities that cannot be converted, create no record. The audit log says why, so a gap is visible rather than silently filled.
Making it count under PAS 2080
Measured embodied carbon feeds the project's PAS 2080 view. That view holds the baseline, the reduction opportunities logged against the hierarchy (build nothing, build less, build clever, build efficiently), and the forecast against what has actually been installed. When the measured figure comes from delivery notes, the gap between forecast and outturn is something you can explain line by line.
For the data path from paperwork to published figure, read from a waste ticket to a reported tonne. For why records beat estimates across the value chain, see why Scope 3 figures disagree.
Sources
- Pomponi, F. and Moncaster, A. (2016). Embodied carbon mitigation and reduction in the built environment: what does the evidence say? Journal of Environmental Management, 181, 687–700. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2016.08.036
- BSI (2023). PAS 2080:2023 Carbon management in buildings and infrastructure.