Luke Osborne UK sustainability lead with Senior Architectural Systems

As part of our What You See Is What You Spec campaign, we are reinforcing the clarity of our own environmental information and calling on the wider fenestration industry to move beyond top-line figures and also adopt the same transparent, evidence based approach.

The call to action follows the publication of a suite of product-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for our aluminium doors, windows and curtain wall systems which challenge the traditional format to provide more accurate data to specifiers.

As part of this unprecedented move, our EPDs include the environmental impact of all system components, including thermal breaks, gaskets, and fixings, as well as fabrication and delivery to site via our fabricator network. The energy-intensive extrusion process is also accounted for, but importantly the glazing has been omitted. This is because glazing, which is not typically supplied by system houses, can artificially lower the carbon figure for the aluminium system. We believe that for complete accuracy, glazing should always be reported separately through its own EPD.

Our campaign is focused on the belief that specifiers should only be given accurate and useful information and is being headed up by our dedicated UK sustainability lead Luke Osborne. Under Luke’s stewardship, we are reframing the way we communicate information about our low carbon aluminium to provide more detail and context so that specifiers are empowered to challenge some of the bolder claims that are often made. A key part of this is our desire to see the industry move away from the over reliance of quoting carbon figures relating to aluminium billets in isolation as this doesn’t account for the extrusion and profiling process and therefore doesn’t reflect the products that are actually installed on site.

For our part, we are keen to provide greater clarity around our own aluminium extrusion processes and how that affects the billet figure that is so often quoted. We currently offer two options – our standard aluminium, known as ReAl 4.0 and our lower carbon option which is available on request, ReAl 2.0.

The standard ReAl 4.0 aluminium has a billet figure of 3.5 kg CO₂e/kg and an extrusion figure of 0.75 kg CO₂e/kg to give an overall carbon footprint of 4.25 kg CO₂e/kg for mill finish aluminium profiles. ReAl 2.0 has a billet carbon footprint of 1.61 kg CO₂e/kg, which when added to the 0.75 kg CO₂e/kg figure for extrusion process, gives an overall figure of 2.36 kg CO₂e/kg for mill finish aluminium profiles.

Our UK sustainability lead Luke Osborne explains further: “As carbon figures relating to aluminium billets alone don’t give an accurate picture of the products installed on site, the extrusion process must be factored in to any carbon calculations as well as all the individual components that make up the specific system. Otherwise, there are significant discrepancies in terms of what has been claimed, and what is true in reality. With many public sector projects now engaging with carbon auditors to check for this very issue, the need for full transparency is not only an ethical matter but also a commercial one.

“We have developed our EPDs specifically to address this widespread problem and to hopefully buck the trend to create a more accurate benchmark for how the environmental performance of aluminium fenestration systems is positioned and communicated. I firmly believe that EPDs should be open to interrogation, audit, and robust scrutiny, making them a useful resource for specifiers rather than simply a marketing or sales tool.”