‘WE WOULD LIKE TO BECOME WATER POSITIVE AT EVERY SITE WE WORK ON’
States Sourabh Mukherjee, Executive Vice President – Clean Energy & Sustainability, Tata Projects
TAt Tata Projects, we are on the right track and confident of building a Greener Earth tomorrow, where our future generation move from mere sustainability of the planet to prosperity and peace.
atas is a name that resonates with quality and public good. Their footprint in constructions is equally sustainable and strong. Here’s talking to EVP, Tata Projects.
Excerpts from an interview: What are the challenges in adopting sustainability in construction?
I rate the construction industry as one of the prime hard-to-abate sectors, primarily built around steel and cement, facing multiple challenges in its journey to sustainability. Reducing the embodied carbon and transitioning to carbon-efficient methods and materials remains the most significant challenge.
Other major challenges include lack of funding as well as restrictions on expenditure and reluctance to incur higher capital cost when needed to include sustainable practices.
Lack of long-term perspective, as well as a lack of awareness adds to this. Globally, the general perception that addressing sustainability leads to incurring greater capital cost. In the build environment, on an average, roughly 76% of the carbon emission comes during the operating cycle of a building. So myopic approach towards capex during construction, without addressing the operational carbon impact, leads to resistance to change.
Insufficient/inconsistent policies, regulations, incentives, and lack of commitment by leadership also becomes an impediment. World over regulatory mandates, laced with incentives, have helped usher in sustainable practices, and our construction world needs similar fillip.
Also, local market structures and ease of entry have resulted in a fragmented landscape of mostly small companies with limited economies.
And finally, insufficient integration and link-up in the industry, both upstream and downstream, and limited research and development efforts towards sustainable solutions.
How is the company adopting sustainable construction practices?
Tata Group companies have announced their ambitious Net Zero 2045 target and we have aligned our businesses with the Group’s goals.
Our sustainability agenda is built on resource efficiency, creating low carbon operations, promoting green vendors, and incorporating engineering innovations to reduce our environmental and ecological impact. This is done through dedicated efforts across our project sites wherein we are pursuing our vision of being the most sustainable infrastructure company in the world.
Our major focus areas are material management, use of alternate and sustainable materials, modular construction techniques, water and waste management along with developing sustainable supply chain by encouraging green vendors.
On the materials management side, we have developed systems to monitor our material consumption by their categories. This system helps us to ensure optimal material usage across our operations thus contributing to the circular economy agenda.
With a focus on sustainable material selection, our philosophy is to precisely articulate the criteria for material management by reducing, reusing, and promoting the judicious use of resources across all our sites. We promote use of alternate materials that are made from waste generated from thermal power and steel plants. We are also using PPC cement for making concrete, replacing conventional shuttering. We have partnered with suppliers who provide simplified solutions to recycling construction & demolition (C&D) waste and producing M-Sand which replaces natural sand.
Using modular construction techniques such as pre-cast and prefabricated elements, not only helped us improve our overall productivity but also helped reduce material wastage. We also focus on Value Engineering and Lean Engineering to enhance productivity and ensure that our sites function with factory-like precision. Towards the same, we have implemented Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems and other state-of-the-art software, aimed at evaluating designed building features, systems and material selection thereby achieving lower material cost and wastage.
Water remains a critical shared resource and we have undertaken initiatives to reduce, reuse, recycle and re-generate water in our operations to the maximum possible extent reducing our dependency on freshwater. Towards better measurement, monitoring and managing, we have installed water meters at various sites and been able to consistently reduce our water footprint through use of curing compounds, PC-based admixtures, curing pump synchronisation and use of sprinklers. We have also installed WTP/STP at our labour colonies to recycle water and reusing in other activities. Our aim is to become ‘water positive’ in the coming days.
What is the way forward for making construction more sustainable? What are your future plans in this direction?
As I mentioned earlier, transition to low carbon building materials is the key to decarbonising the construction environment. The cement industry is responsible for about a quarter of all industry CO2 emissions, and it also generates the most CO2 emissions per dollar of revenue. Addressing cement emissions is therefore critical in propelling the transition. An important supplement to reducing embodied emissions is developing a closedloop economy by minimising waste sent to landfills. This can be improved in several ways, starting with making accurate estimates of required construction materials via tools such as BIM, ensuring the recycling of demolition waste, or, in the case of modular construction, using potential end-of-life building components or products. Similarly, moving to low carbon steel, eventually into green steel, over the coming years would further enhance this objective. Tata Projects is working closely with our cement and steel suppliers to address this need.
Overall, no single player in the ecosystem can tackle the complex issues on their own, and there is an urgent need for players to collaborate and increase transparency to accelerate the green transition. Partnerships and mobilisation are needed to realise the pathways to build and scale new materials and technologies in a cost-efficient and timely manner. Measuring sustainability effects and benefits using consistent metrics offers better points for comparison and enables competitive financing. It also allows companies to guide end consumers on choices.
With the climate change challenges manifesting itself increasingly every passing day, the construction industry has no other choice but to be more sustainable; and exciting times lay ahead in this journey. At Tata Projects, we are on the right track and confident of building a Greener Earth tomorrow, where our future generation move from mere sustainability of the planet to prosperity and peace.