What is whole life carbon?

It used to be the case that most of the carbon footprint of a new home over its lifetime would be from operational emissions related to the energy used by the occupants. 

With the increasing thermal performance of new homes over recent times, and as the grid continues to decarbonise, the focus is beginning to shift away from operational carbon and towards embodied carbon of construction materials – the emissions associated with manufacturing products and assembling them into a complete building, followed by the maintenance and eventual deconstruction of the building. 

Embodied and operational carbon together make up the whole life carbon (WLC) of the product, which is the important thing to be able to measure and reduce. 

At Places for People, we’re committed to delivering thriving communities for now and future customers and therefore understanding our whole life carbon footprint is at the forefront of our agenda. 

Introducing the Whole Life Carbon Conventions and Tool

Today the Future Homes Hub launches the Whole Life Carbon Conventions for New Homes, which will help tackle one of the biggest challenges that we’ve seen in the past few years due to a lack of an approved national methodology; the inconsistency in tools and interpretations that has led to an uneven playing field in conducting assessments. 

Alongside this, the Hub have launched the first version of its Whole Life Carbon Assessment Tool for testing. In short, the tool allows housebuilders to quickly calculate embodied carbon by having a number of construction build-ups and values already built in the tool, giving a consistent embodied carbon measurement. 

This means, for the first time, we can quickly calculate how much carbon our homes will produce over their lifecycle and be able to compare with our peers, like for like. 



As we deepen our approach to reducing emissions we rapidly need much better information on where the carbon emissions arise for different build types. Only then can we set credible targets that we can embrace with confidence.

Collaboration across the sector

Along with a long list of other homebuilders, product manufacturers and whole life carbon experts, we have been involved in the Future Homes Hub working groups that developed the Whole life carbon conventions and tool. 

Although we’ve reached this milestone, the work for these groups will continue – they will be reconvened to review any new or improved data/reference points, consider whether the method needs updating, and add further build-ups and functionality as the tool is developed.   

How could this influence the design process?

Calculating the embodied carbon can be time consuming and expensive so having the free tool will mean that everyone can calculate the embodied carbon on developments at an early stage. For us, this is invaluable, as we will be able to make adjustments to the design or specification quickly and check the impact it has on the embodied carbon calculations as the project progresses through the concept, planning and detailed design stages. This will open up a world of possibilities and start to influence the design choices we make along with the materials and manufactures we select. 

We will be asking each of our teams to test the tool on our house types at each site over the coming weeks – and providing feedback to the Hub to help make the next version of the tool even better. 

What next?

Being able to measure and report embodied and whole life carbon emissions consistently is a vital first step on the environmental journey that Places for People and the whole industry needs to take. 

Looking ahead, for industry it is important that manufacturers and supply chains are also fully part of the process. Places for People will be working with our supply chain and manufacturers to raise awareness of embodied carbon and our shared responsibility to reduce the embodied and whole life carbon of the homes we build. 

We also need to agree to educate our professionals with the knowledge and skills required to accurately assess and reduce embodied carbon; continue to innovate in construction techniques and government need to provide clear policy frameworks, grants and subsidies that support the sector to deliver sustainable house building for generations to come. 

There is work to do, but this is an important step in unlocking the full potential of embodied carbon and meeting that COP26 commitment. 

View the Whole Life Carbon Conventions for New Homes and download the Whole Life Carbon Tool