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The BRE Green Guide rates external walls using
brickwork A+

– you can’t get better than that*

The BRE’s latest Green Guide to Specification assigned the highest possible accreditation A+ to every external wall it rated that contained brickwork.

It states that the choice of external wall specification is probably subject to the widest range of practical, economic and visual considerations compared to other building elements and can account for around 30% of building costs.

The Green Guide to Specification is part of the BRE’s Environmental Assessment Method, an accredited environmental rating scheme for buildings. It examines the impact of brick and other materials used in six generic types of building – commercial, school, healthcare, retail, residential and industrial. The components are rated across 13 different criteria, such as climate change, ozone depletion, and toxicity to land. The scoring runs from A+, the best (or having the least environmental impact), down to E, the worst (or having the greatest environmental impact), such as some forms of curtain walling.

BRE has published the Green Guide to Specification annually since 1996. It is updated every year, to reflect changes in the manufacturing process, the way materials are used, and advances in environmental knowledge.

The guide provides designers and specifiers with a user-friendly, yet authoritative guide to making the best environmental choices for materials and components. It is the industry bible for green ratings.

Sustainability is a critical element in building these days. Already we have seen new Energy Performance Certificates, for large commercial buildings as well as housing. The government’s Code for Sustainable Homes stipulates that carbon emissions must be cut to zero by 2016.

As the BRE’s Green Guide makes clear, sustainability is not just about the use of carbon-free materials. Nor is it just about the embodied energy accrued in its production and delivery from ‘cradle to gate’. It is about the total energy consumption of a product – including that used to maintain it, once it’s part of a building, and the fate of ‘end-of-life’ material.

Brick is produced from an abundant natural material and tends to be made and delivered locally. It lasts for centuries, it complements other building materials comfortably and can be adapted as a building changes use. It dissipates all its embodied energy over its life in the average building and offers high thermal mass. Brick requires very little maintenance and both individual units and entire brick buildings can be recycled.

Every BDA member has an environmental management system in place and 85% of UK brick output is certified to ISO 14001. The association drew up a national sustainability strategy in 2001, one of the first industrial sectors to do so. The BDA reports every year to the government and to the European Union on areas such as carbon emissions, which the industry is committed to cutting. At the moment, an average 12% of the material used in brick production is drawn from alternative, recycled and secondary sources, conserving natural resources.

Carbon emissions work out at around 28kg a year for a square metre of clay brickwork. That’s the total energy, from production to delivery, ‘embodied’ in the brick. Putting that into context, the energy used to produce and deliver the brickwork for an average semi-detached home is less than 2% of what would be spent heating that home, over a lifespan of 150 years.

The lifespan of brick extends well beyond that. A recent survey of 900 homes found that brick structures can have a lifespan of 500 years and more. Maintenance is minimal. In contrast to other materials, wind and rain and snow will not damage brick. Weather merely mellows it. And, when the time comes to knock down brickwork, it can be recycled on site – and old lime mortar bricks can be cleaned up and used again as bricks.

_{* Source: The Building Research Establishment Green Guide to Specification}