Alison Scotland puts early design at the centre of offsite sustainability

Offsite construction’s sustainability potential begins before factory production, with the decisions made around design, materials and who is involved in planning a project.

That was the central message from Alison Scotland, chief executive of the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC), in her presentation at the prefabAUS conference.

Scotland described collaboration as part of the sector’s DNA, bringing together designers, engineers, manufacturers, builders, regulators and researchers. However, those relationships need to influence project decisions early enough to prevent conflicting requirements and costly changes.

“If you’ve got the engineers saying one thing, the architect saying something else, the constructors on site doing something completely different, it’s not going to work,” she said.

For Scotland, the relationship between productivity and sustainability is practical. More time spent planning can reduce mistakes, avoid unnecessary material use and make delivery more predictable.

She argued that involving the supply chain and the broader value chain during design can help deliver sustainable outcomes without necessarily increasing costs.

Design for use and reuse
Scotland outlined three connected ASBEC priorities: accelerating decarbonisation, improving climate resilience and advancing circularity.

For offsite manufacturers, circularity extends beyond recycling factory waste or specifying recycled materials. It starts with avoiding waste, then keeping buildings, components and materials in use at their highest possible value.

“You spend more time in planning so that you don’t have to have that waste, the mistakes on the site,” she said.

Design for manufacture and assembly should therefore also consider disassembly, allowing buildings to respond to changing needs and materials to retain value beyond their first use.

“We want our buildings to be adaptable, to different needs in the future,” Scotland said.

She also addressed embodied carbon, arguing that measurement tools need supporting policy, skills and processes if they are to influence construction decisions. Progress requires coordinated changes across the sector, rather than relying on a single adjustment to the National Construction Code.

Scotland pointed to RMIT’s research into decarbonising prefabricated housing as an example of bringing different professions together to identify barriers and develop recommendations.

She linked that work with the Future of Housing Construction Centre of Excellence at Melbourne Polytechnic, highlighting opportunities for targeted upskilling through microcredentials and training in sustainability, net zero and circularity.

Social and community housing offer a particularly relevant setting for these principles, she suggested. Providers that retain and operate their buildings have a direct interest in good design, lower operating costs and assets that can accommodate future needs.

For the offsite sector, her message was to bring those requirements into the first design conversation, alongside manufacturing and delivery.

“The future is up to us,” Scotland said. “It’s all of us working together.”

Find ASBEC HERE