Our team provided design services for a series of enabling works for High Speed 2 in Northamptonshire, including new highways construction, diversions, drainage and landscaping. A key requirement in the contract was to accurately measure the carbon footprint at each design gateway and to develop solutions to meet HS2’s target for a 30% carbon reduction compared to a standard reference baseline.
Project name
High Speed 2 Enabling Works
Client
Fusion Joint Venture
Location
Northamptonshire
Services provided
The challenges in this project lay both in developing the low carbon design solutions and in creating a carbon measurement approach that:
Our design solution provided a 33% carbon reduction, exceeding HS2’s target. This was achieved through a mixture of design optimisations for materials efficiency, substitution with better-performing products, and making best use of the landscaping design for carbon sequestration.
Interesting trade-offs explored in the design and carbon measurement work were the balance between construction-stage carbon and lifetime carbon impacts – particularly with regard to the longevity and expected maintenance requirements of materials, as the life-cycle assessment (LCA) was required to cover a 120 year asset lifetime in HS2’s technical standards.
To measure carbon at each design gateway and compare it to the reference baseline, our approach was to use a mixture of product-specific LCA data where available, project-specific calculations for other materials, and a verified woodland carbon tool for sequestration calculations. This approach was selected because it could be easily tailored to the information available at each design gateway, providing more insight and flexibility than a generic lifecycle assessment package, while meeting HS2’s demanding technical standards documentation.
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