Sustainability Report

The embodied carbon of this project was calculated item-by-item from the construction quantity schedule (partitions, ceilings, flooring, wall finishes, doors/windows, and electrical installation) and the furniture/fittings procurement list (loose furniture, lighting, artwork, built-in casework, and planters). Material quantities were taken from the actual project construction and procurement quotations.

The calculation was modelled manually in a spreadsheet (no dedicated LCA software was used); emission factors were estimated from publicly available databases (e.g. the University of Bath ICE Database) and industry-average benchmarks, rather than product-specific EPDs. The assessment covers the material production stage (Modules A1-A3 per EN 15978), with transport (A4, estimated at ~6% of A1-A3) and construction/installation (A5, estimated at ~12% of A1-A3) added using industry-typical percentage allowances.

Excluded from the assessment: HVAC equipment, fire and low-voltage/ELV systems (excluded in the source procurement documents), the building structure (unchanged, as this is a fit-out of an existing building), and the use/end-of-life stages. Several items of office furniture (workstation desks/chairs and some visitor chairs) are existing furniture being reused and were counted as zero embodied carbon, since no new manufacturing occurred — furniture reuse is a key carbon-reduction strategy adopted in this project.

Operational emissions were estimated from the VRF air-conditioning equipment schedule (Gree GMV5), cross-checked against an actual peak-summer electricity bill. Both methods gave consistent results (16.4 and 12.7 kgCO2e/m²; a mid-range value was used).

Emission factor: Guangdong grid average, 0.4403 kgCO2/kWh (MEE, 2024). Covers HVAC electricity only — lighting and other equipment loads are excluded due to lack of sub-metered data.

Key measure: inverter VRF system with independent zone control, avoiding whole-floor overconditioning.