The insurance industry has an opportunity to support a transition that could have one of the biggest mitigating impacts on the current trajectory of our climate, our ecologies and our economies. This is the message being delivered by the team at Material Cultures where Paloma Gormley (pictured) serves as director – and it’s an especially timely one given the sharpening focus on the sustainability gap being created by modern construction materials and methods.
She noted that, alongside being a design practice, Material Cultures does a lot of research into how to bridge this gap, which involves looking at materials, supply chains and understanding the long-term impacts of material extraction, production and distribution. There’s increasing awareness of the embodied carbon of these processes, she said, and that you can throw as much tech as you like at a building, but the baseline issue of its carbon construction remains.
“We work to develop better ways of building things,” she said. “We’re really interested in bio-based construction but not only is it inherently low carbon but you’re actively storing sequestered carbon in that plant matter. So, you’re making buildings carbon positive which have the potential to be a genuinely positive contributor not just to reducing carbon impact, but also creating carbon sink.”
Offering some examples of the sustainability gap in construction, Gormley highlighted that so much of the construction industry is now based around concrete frame and concrete block. That, alongside brick, is now the standard baseline for construction in the UK, she said, and these materials are incredibly carbon intensive, largely due to the heat required to produce them.
Material Cultures is promoting the use of bio-based materials that come from plants like hemp or other straw producers which can be used to substitute oil-based insulators – which help create equally (if not better) performing buildings and which naturally sequester carbon. And as each of these different materials have different roles in the building, she said, the substitutions work differently each time.
“In our understanding of the incredibly carbon-heavy industry as it exists and what would be required to transform it, we see that plant-based biomaterials is the one area that has the potential to have the biggest impact on the construction industry, which is why we’ve made it our focus,” she said. “The research that we do is increasingly rooted in agriculture and making the link between land use and construction, and nature regeneration and construction. So, the two things need to be quite aligned as they evolve.”
The firm’s research has revealed the barriers to making that transition – and they run the gamut from access to the right skills and training, to the availability and cost of these solutions, the challenge of scaling these new supply chains and, crucially, the bureaucratic frameworks within which this transition would sit. Regulation is part of that framework, Gormley said, but the insurance and mortgage sectors are also crucial elements of this infrastructure.
“In terms of insurance specifically, what we see is the insurance industry essentially supporting the status quo, which is materials like steel and concrete, along the entire supply chain,” she said. “That’s from the point of extraction, to the vehicles on which that material travels, to the workers in that supply chain. Then the cost of that impact is then picked up by insurance at the end of the day. So… the true cost of these practices isn’t really accounted for.
“I think, in a way what’s happened is the insurance industry has kind of grown up alongside the oil-age of construction and architecture whereby abundant quantities of cheaply available oil have enabled this very high-energy, high-carbon ‘technified’ construction industry to evolve. And all the centuries of inherently low carbon construction have essentially gone out of the frame as our contemporary risk analysis and insurance [industries] have emerged.”
What Material Cultures is promoting, she said, is for the industry to explore what getting back to first-principles around building design and construction might look like – and to imagine how insurance could re-align itself with processes that are ecologically and climate positive. The firm is working on several projects that underscore the benefits of bio-based materials but the cost of insurance is proving prohibitive.
Gormley firmly believes that insurance has a real opportunity to become an enabler rather than a roadblock to the use of bio-based materials in construction. It’s not a new world for the industry, she said, as these materials are practices that have been demonstrated to be highly effective over millennia. Rather, it’s about rebuilding confidence in the potential of these materials and practices to support a more sustainable construction industry.
Making real inroads in this ambition will require investment in ambitious projects that will serve as use cases. It’s clear that there’s a great deal more work to do to create new standards, and this will require a concerted investment of time and resources in understanding the available alternatives to oil-based materials and how these can be used.
“In most cases, I think it will be seen that the perceived risks are generally so much greater than the reality,” she said. “The question of fire generally comes up almost immediately when you start talking about natural and bio-based materials. But when you scratch beneath the surface, and this has been shown really effectively in timber construction, timber can perform far better than steel and many other conventional structural alternatives. … A lot of the materials that we advocate for are inherently fire-resistant.
“There are examples of equivalent buildings that have been caught in wildfires in Australia. One is a polyurethane and steel construction and the other is a straw bale construction. And the straw bale buildings are the ones that survived the blaze. There’s a huge amount of evidence that already exists but I think there’s a lot more to do to build that confidence in the industry. There’s been so much investment in the last 50-to-100 years in demonstrating the viability of oil-based materials and carbon-heavy materials. And really, that just needs to be balanced out with an equivalent amount of investment in low-carbon and restorative materials.”
Key to moving the dial on this conversation will be more cross-sector dialogue that proactively explores the opportunities at hand and how different industries can and should be working together. Greater dialogue with regulators, insurance companies and other stakeholders in the construction industry value chain is high on the agenda of the team at Material Cultures and Gormely said she’s looking to kick this into the next gear.
“We all need to be working concurrently because, in order to solve these problems, we need a very coordinated approach and a lot more communication,” she said. “[…] I think the potential transition of construction from being one of the worst [carbon] contributors to being a really positive carbon story is immense. And if insurance got behind that, it could be extraordinarily enabling and encourage others to follow just by setting a really good precedent for the proactive thinking and action that needs to happen.”
