Fletcher Building : and Mott MacDonald join forces to reduce carbon emissions on infrastructure projects

Fletcher Building and Mott MacDonald have worked together to create a New Zealand Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) Library housed on Mott MacDonald's international Moata Carbon Portal.

The library will include 13 Fletcher Building EPDs which have been specifically developed to make it easier for customers in the infrastructure sector to choose products which allow designers and constructors to reduce embodied carbon in infrastructure they build.

EPDs can be thought of as a 'nutrition label on food'. Their role is to tell the environmental story of a product over its life cycle, using a science-based, standards-compliant, and independently verified approach. It is these traits that give people designing and planning infrastructure projects the ability to compare products and a carbon baseline to make informed choices about which products they will use.

"When it comes to building a more climate resilient future, we all have a part to play," says Fletcher Building's Sustainability Manager, Dr Ferran de Miguel Mercader. "As a leading building products manufacturer, we recognise that a very simple yet highly effective step we can take is providing our customers with information about the environmental impact of our products."

"EPDs make it easy for people to understand the environmental impacts of a product they may be considering using. The NZ EPD Library builds on this by housing the information in one simple portal reducing the need for people to search multiple sites for this type of information," says Ferran.

Mott MacDonald first introduced the Moata Carbon Portal (the Portal) to New Zealand in 2018 to democratise decarbonisation and simplify the process of calculating carbon in the built environment.

The Portal is essentially a carbon calculator aligned to PAS 2080 (a global standard for managing embodied carbon in infrastructure) that allows the supply chain to identify and calculate carbon emissions for their design. Developed in collaboration with industry experts, the Portal allows for carbon insights to be accessed by anyone, not just the carbon experts.

"We welcome Fletcher Building's leadership to establish an EPD library in the Moata Carbon Portal. Surfacing emission information and inviting collaboration across the supply chain is a key step to achieving New Zealand's sustainability goals and we are excited to be part of this initiative," said Mark Boniface, carbon account leader at Mott MacDonald.

Fletcher Building is encouraging other building product manufacturers in New Zealand to work with Mott MacDonald to incorporate their product EPDs into the Moata Carbon Portal.

"Fletcher Building has committed to reducing our carbon emissions by 30% by 2030. Currently we have achieved a 16% reduction since our FY18 base year. Our decarbonisation initiatives to date and those in the pipeline are resulting in lower embodied carbon across many of our products.

"We know there are other manufacturers out there doing really smart things to improve their products, so we are calling for them to put their EPDs into the library. Fundamentally the more complete the library is, the more informed designers of infrastructure projects will be when choosing products that can support a more sustainable society," says Ferran.