With 40 manufacturing sites across the country – spanning locations near the Dorset coastline to Durham and Newcastle in the North East of England, operational efficiency is essential – as is renewal of the estate and developing new technologies at each location.

Our major investment in our Atlas factory, located in Walsall, West Midlands is an important investment project for the Ibstock Group. Atlas has been selected as a ‘pathfinder factory’ on our journey to net zero – and commissioning is on track. The bricks we make at Atlas are estimated to be 50% lower carbon than the previous factory. Atlas will play a critical role in accelerating our decarbonisation ambitions.

Switching to 100% renewable electricity has already reduced Scope 2 emissions. “We were also the first building products manufacturer in the UK to procure 100% of its electricity from renewable sources, and we’re now looking at expanding our use of renewables across our estate – this will be in addition to our solar park at our Leicester HQ,” says Emily. “Natural gas consumption is a big area of emissions for us, so we’re also investigating alternative fuels including syngas and hydrogen.”

In addition, Ibstock is already looking beyond 2030. By that point, the business will have learnt a great deal more and successes will be scaled up. This will mean being connected on technological progress and leading on innovation – including the means to capture and store carbon that is impossible to eradicate from the company’s processes.

When you ask Emily if Ibstock’s products are ‘fit for the future’, her response is a resoundingly positive one. “We are evolving all the time in order to ensure they are fit for the future,” she says. ‘Dematerialisation’ – or making the same products using less material – has been a particular success story in terms of accelerating the pace of change towards 2030.

Sharing its progress to date has been a big part of Ibstock’s commitment to communicate its ESG progress. For example, in 2022, Ibstock published a white paper featuring three detailed case studies of transformational projects in its brick and concrete divisions. Each case study explains details of the project objectives, specific technical challenges, and shareable best practice about the efforts to reduce the amount of raw material used in the manufacture process.

Feeding further into the need for collaboration and communication, the intention behind the paper was to provide a good practice ‘sharing guide’ (rather than a blueprint) for use by customers, partners and industry peers – with a truthful account of the challenges faced along the way.

Ibstock’s new business unit Ibstock Futures is also a critical piece in the jigsaw here. Launched in 2021, it was established to provide a focus on the development of technologies, products and solutions that are aligned to sustainability, modern methods of construction and the industrialisation of construction processes.  With two acquisitions in this space in the first year, the Futures business has ambitious growth plans to diversify the product range on offer to existing and new customers.

With better material efficiency comes the possibility to start looking at incorporating principles of the circular economy, like using recycled content and moving away from consumption of virgin aggregate.

The longevity of clay and concrete products is an important element in reducing raw material demand. The upfront carbon of a product like a brick can’t be ignored, but neither can its durability – with a minimum active service life of a 150 years.

Emily and her colleagues are well aware that more ‘conscious’ approaches to specification are driving change in the built environment at a policy level. Ibstock is therefore encouraging architects, housebuilders and designers to reflect this thinking and look at building homes with an eye to the longer term. That means considering the whole life carbon of products and materials capable of supporting that goal. 

“For example, across our concrete batching factories, we’ve spent hundreds of hours of research and development – often working in partnership with our customers and suppliers - on exploring new processes and concrete specifications,” says Emily. Not only is this resulting in products with lower embodied carbon, but it is also making more efficient use of materials. The wide-ranging work features the following elements: Using lower carbon cement or cement replacements as part of concrete products; replacing steel reinforcement with a basalt alternative. 

“If we look at our clay business, brick is one of the only products I can think of that improves with age,” says Emily. “It usually looks better after 100 years than when it started. And its in-use carbon impact is very low, as there’s very little maintenance and repair.”

Ibstock is keenly aware of the built environment’s contribution to global carbon emissions. As a component part of that built environment, the company recognises its responsibility to help reduce that impact.

Climate change is causing more frequent, and longer, extreme weather. The social impacts of that are worsening, so thinking about decarbonisation only in carbon terms is not an option. Ibstock, and the entire construction sector, has to consider the impact of decarbonisation on people’s lives: how it can be done fairly, and how people can be left in a better situation as a result of those efforts.

Overall, Emily feels the effort and investment is being put into the right places. It comes back to the need for collaboration, and the whole sector doing that collectively in order to be able to make a real difference.

“We’ve still got time, just about, to make an impact. I’m naturally an optimistic person, and I’m encouraged by being in a role and a business that wants to make a change. It’s not easy. It is a worry, and my children worry about it.

“We know we’re doing the right things. We just need to do them faster.”

Find out more about Ibstock’s ESG Strategy to 2030, or watch Emily Landsborough talk about our progress in our new Q&A ESG video.