Bovis is a main contractor delivering high-rise commercial office buildings, residential developments, hospitals, cultural and university buildings and defence works. With 99% of its emissions sitting in scope 3, most of that tied to purchased goods and services across its four big materials, concrete, steel, aluminium and glass, Bovis has long engaged with industry groups like Concrete Zero to help decarbonise its supply chain. Ceire Kenny heads up the Sustainable Futures team at Bovis.
Q: What makes sustainability in the built environment particularly challenging?
What’s unique about working in the built environment is that you’re not producing a product coming off a manufacturing line the same way every time. They are incredibly context-specific products. You’re never building the same building twice, because they’re physically in different places, for different people, with different uses, built to the budget and specifications for that end user. What makes it even more difficult is that every single time you start a new project, you have a completely new cast of developers, engineers, architects and subcontractors. So even if you find a solution that works on one building, you then have to try and replicate it across your entire portfolio.
Q: Why does glass matter so much in Bovis’s emissions picture?
Looking at Bovis’s emissions, 99% of it sits in our scope 3, and most of that comes from our purchased goods and services, which comes from our four big materials: concrete, steel, aluminium and glass. And there’s a lot of glass in buildings. You’re probably sitting near a window right now, or you’re in a commercial office building with glazed partitions in the meeting rooms.
Q: Why did Bovis decide to get involved with ResponsibleGlass specifically?
We need industry organisation groups for all of these materials to help them decarbonise, and we already had a couple for the other big materials. We’re part of Concrete Zero, and in the industry there’s also Steel Zero, ResponsibleSteel, and ASI for aluminium (at least at a billet level). But there wasn’t anything for glass, so as soon as we heard about ResponsibleGlass, we got involved.
Q: What can an industry-wide group like ResponsibleGlass do that working project by project can’t?
There’s a lot of good you can do on a project level, but you’re still very laterally constrained by the specific requirements for that project. It’s only in industry organisational level groups where you’re able to bring together everybody from the demand side and everybody from the supply side, and ask those high-level questions: what does good look like, and what should we be using our collective demand signalling to push towards? Are there issues on the manufacturing side that I would never know about? Because we’re multiple layers back. We don’t buy glass, we buy facades, and the emissions are happening all the way over there. So it’s only through groups like this that we get that level of visibility.
Q: What are you hoping ResponsibleGlass gives Bovis as it sets the Standard?
One of the most important things ResponsibleGlass is going to give us is a shared language and clear metrics, so that we can have a consistent ask for our supply chain. Our power is in our procurement and having that clarity through a sustainable certification standard makes it so much easier for us to roll that out across what is a very complex portfolio and supply chain. We joined because we know we can get further together, and we’re really looking forward to bringing these aspirations from roadmap into reality with everyone.
