Insight
5 Minutes with Richard Sykes
Navigating the Future of Sustainable Building Materials
With over two decades of experience in the construction materials sector, Rich Sykes has become a driving force behind commercial transformation and sustainability within the UK’s builders merchant landscape.
As a Product Sustainability & Compliance Director within Building Materials UK, Rich led pioneering initiatives in Scope 3 carbon quantification, regulatory compliance, and supplier engagement.
If you’re interested in better understanding responsible sourcing, what manufacturers can do to build stronger commercial propositions around ESG, and why collaboration across the value chain is more critical than ever, then read on.
Here’s what we discussed:
Collingwood: You’ve played a pivotal role in major procurement transformation projects at your previous companies. What do you consider to be the key ingredients for driving commercial change in a complex supply chain like building materials?
Rich: The two major transformation projects I was involved in were several years apart and driven by different “burning platforms”, but their success shared common foundations: uniting the team around a shared goal, taking a data-driven approach, and establishing good governance.
The creation of a compelling narrative was pivotal to the two projects, allowing procurement teams to explain not just the “what” but the “why”, and helped ensure an organisation-wide united front.
Fact-based negotiation is where I have seen procurement capability evolve the most over the decade I spent working alongside these teams. Allowing data to guide which levers offer the greatest value extraction, and those to disregard, helped quantify opportunities and maximise the effectiveness of our approach.
Finally, robust KPIs with clear ownership were essential. They reinforced accountability, kept project plans on track, and were a key driver in ensuring the ambitions of each project were met.
Collingwood: From your essential work in quantifying Scope 3 emissions and digitising carbon data, how do you see sustainability evolving as a commercial lever in the building material sector?
Rich: Sustainability used to be the future – it is now the present, and what were once “nice-to-haves” are fast becoming a licence to trade across the construction value chain. We are in an increasingly regulatory environment and commercialising sustainability is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It varies depending on the market; the priorities of the volume housebuilder or Tier 1 contractor vary greatly from the wants and needs of an SME builder which are in turn different from the Public Sector and local authorities.
One rapidly evolving area of ESG is the data dependency that sits behind product. Whether that is the quantification of embodied carbon or water intensity in manufacturing processes, the qualification of marketing claims, packaging data, supply chain transparency. This robust data, alongside the more traditional attributes of price and specification is progressively becoming a value driver. As organisations look to manage the regulatory and reputational risks across their supply chains, not having transparent data will increasingly become a barrier to entry.
Collingwood: And, conversely, what are the biggest challenges in embedding circularity across the value chain?
Rich: This is a knotty issue for the whole supply chain which is efficient at moving product in a linear fashion – from raw material extraction through to final installation – involving a number of different parties, sometimes with competing priorities. However when a product or system reaches end of life in a lot of instances the business case for reuse or recycling doesn’t yet stack up, either commercially or environmentally.
I recall a conversation with a manufacturer of a building material which innovations in recycling technology had made viable for reuse at end of life. Yet, they calculated after ~30 miles of transporting the recovered material from the demolition site this would have emitted more carbon than manufacturing virgin product, which becomes a limitation for projects in and around major conurbations.
We are starting to see new entrants coming in to tackle these challenges where circularity principles are being designed in. Take The Pallet LOOP’s work to address pallet reuse within construction and is easing pain points for contractors, distributors and manufacturers. Large scale change in circularity is going to take a big cultural shift though, as we’re attaching value to materials that for years have been treated as disposable.
Collingwood: You’ve worked extensively with ESG teams across strategic partners. What does effective collaboration between building product manufacturers and distributors look like in practice; in particular, what works well?
Rich: Manufacturers are constantly innovating, they have a vital role to play in helping raise the bar in the commercial and operational teams of distributors to help them become more literate in not just the features but the real-world benefits their products deliver.
This must be supported by educating customers on how these products can help them navigate the biggest set of changes to building regulations we’ve had in a generation ahead of The Future Homes Standard – a particular pain point for the SME builder.
Products that provide solutions for customers looking to build more sustainably, whether that is heat pumps, low-carbon alternative materials, nature habitats, SUDS solutions, are not the natural comfort zone of the traditional merchant or distributor. The most effective collaborations I have seen are those that extend beyond ESG teams; my team working with the sustainability team at a manufacturer in a silo is never going to “fix” sustainability. It has to become embedded and normalised within an organisation.
Collingwood: In my experience, larger, corporate manufacturers often have the resources to build robust EPD offerings that align well with distributor sustainability goals. However, SMEs often struggle to keep pace. From your experience, what are the key gaps you see in how SMEs approach EPDs, and what steps could they take to better support their commercial relationships with builders merchants in this area?
Rich: An agreed approach on how to surface emissions data on building materials has felt a bit like the Wild West. Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) can be costly, complex and time-consuming to produce. Also, while not wholesale I’ve definitely picked up a sense of anxiety in some manufacturers of perceived negative impacts of EPDs where products are viewed less favourably than those with lower emissions. So It’s understandable why many SMEs, especially those in the mid to long tail might have taken the decision to hold off.
However, the sector does seem to have settled on EPDs now, and some of those larger organisations you reference that were early adopters of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and EPD generation have bought that expertise in-house and are now starting to industrialise their approach. The demand for EPDs is only going one way – upwards. So for any manufacturers out there still “ostriching” on this, my advice would be to just make a start. For those beginning their journey, I strongly recommend The Supply Chain Sustainability School which has an excellent library of resources to help build capacity within an organisation across all areas of ESG, and provide a gentle on-ramp into LCAs and EPDs.
I was fortunate to sit on the Builders Merchant Federation sustainability working group along with the talented Megan Adlen who used to remind us “all carbon needs to be accounted for” within the construction value chain. She is absolutely right, engaging with EPDs is going to require effort from manufacturers across the whole basket of goods, not just those with the well documented high emission intensity processes.
