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A 43% carbon reduction, measured across eleven completed buildings
Whole-life assessments of the first BioSIP envelope programme show embodied carbon falling 43% against a conventional reinforced-concrete baseline — without extending programme length.
Eleven buildings, 14,800 m² of gross internal area, all assessed to EN 15978 with the same boundary conditions as their reinforced-concrete baselines. The headline is a 43% reduction in whole-life carbon, and the number holds when the baseline is drawn from the actual local tender rather than a generic benchmark.
Roughly two thirds of the saving is embodied: the BioSIP envelope replaces concrete, mineral insulation and a separate weather layer with one bio-based panel. The remaining third comes from operational demand, where airtightness of 0.3 h⁻¹ at 50 Pa and an unbroken insulation line cut heating energy by about 70%.
What did not improve is worth publishing too. Foundations stayed conventional and account for 21% of remaining embodied carbon; transport of reed stock above 180 km erased a measurable share of the gain on two sites. Both are open problems, and both are documented in the dataset rather than smoothed away.
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