Is your warehouse green enough?

How the construction and use of logistics buildings must change to meet carbon targets

Pressures on logistics operators to reduce their carbon footprint are growing by the year. Reducing logistics’ share of total carbon emissions requires a focus on buildings, as much as transport. Ruari McCallion reports on sustainability-related developments in building design and equipment, construction methods and materials.

Around 25% of total carbon emissions come from the logistics industry. Most is from transport, but 8% comes from steel production and manufacture. As this is essential in building warehouses and commercial facilities, big logistics and warehouse operators are increasingly paying attention to the construction and operation of their premises as well.

In the USA, Amazon has warehouses equipped with solar panels, energy-efficient lighting and advanced cooling systems, for example. Prologis, a leading global logistics real estate company, has several LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified warehouses. These are designed from the outset to be focused on energy efficiency, renewable energy and sustainable building practices. UPS’s facilities often include solar panels, energy-efficient lighting and other sustainable technologies to reduce their environmental impact. IKEA is committed to becoming climate positive by 2030 and has implemented various sustainability measures in its distribution centres, including net-zero energy buildings. DHL is leveraging green technologies to drastically reduce emissions across its warehouses, sorting centres, hubs, terminals and office buildings. UPS intends to have its facilities powered by 25% renewable electricity by 2025; it had achieved eight per cent by 2022.

FedEx’s EVs (electric vehicles) put an extra burden on its energy demand; a reality that it is responding to by sourcing solar power generation, which is installed in 29 of its sites across the world. The solar canopy at its headquarters in Pittsburgh now produces around 30% of the power used on campus.

XPO’s main UK distribution centre in Leicester, England, is its third site to be certified carbon neutral. It was constructed to BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) carbon neutral standards.

BREEAM focuses on achieving net-zero carbon emissions by considering both operational carbon, related to emissions from the building’s energy use during its life, and embodied carbon, which relates to emissions from the construction, maintenance and end-of-life stages. The main assessment categories are energy, water, materials, waste, and land use and ecology.

GLP, widely recognised as a pioneer in sustainable warehousing, built the world’s first net-zero warehouse at Magna Park, Milton Keynes, England. From the outset, it focused on sustainable construction practices and materials.

An idea whose time has come…

…there is nothing as irresistible

We have looked in the past* at initiatives to improve overall environmental performance by focusing on emissions and efficiency in warehouse operations and transport. Authorities in the UK and the EU are encouraging investigation into ‘green steel’ and ‘green construction’; the EU’s project is called GREENSTEEL and the UK’s is labelled SUSTAIN.

The Stegra Project, housed in a steelmaking plant at Boden, Sweden, is scheduled to start operations in 2026, with full-scale production of green steel planned for 2027. It will house Europe’s largest electrolyser facility, which will produce ‘green hydrogen’ from water, using renewable electricity, which will be used in place of fossil fuels to produce ‘green iron’. The iron will, in turn, be used to produce green steel. It is estimated that carbon emissions will be 95% lower than in conventional steelmaking.

GREENSTEEL aims to support the EU in meeting its 2030 climate and energy targets and its 2050 long-term strategy for carbon neutrality. The project focuses on developing technology roadmaps and dividing mid- and long-term pathways for the decarbonisation of the steel industry. Funding options and assessments of economic, social, environmental and industrial impacts of EU policies, across all member countries, will be analysed.

SUSTAIN in the UK is funded and supported by government, universities and private industry. The government’s official involvement is through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). It involves the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick and Swansea – the lead or ‘hub’ – plus Liberty Steel and Tata Steel. The long-established steel plant at Port Talbot, across the bay from Swansea, is in the process of being converted from traditional blast furnacing to electric arc green steel production.

Sustainable building design – beyond the Passivhaus

Swansea University has already demonstrated the practicality and commercial attractiveness of several technologies. They go beyond the ‘Passivhaus’ concept, already established in Germany and the Netherlands. Active Buildings are described as buildings “that support the wider grid network by intelligently integrating renewable energy technologies for heat, power and transport.” They follow ‘passive’ design principles with integrated engineering and architecture, including building orientation and massing, as well as natural daylight, fabric efficiency and natural ventilation. Their energy systems are intelligently controlled to minimise HVAC, lighting and internal transportation loads and use data capture to enable performance validation, optimisation and refinement of predictive control strategies.

Various renewable energy technologies are incorporated and work together in a single system to generate, store and release heat and electricity. The Active Classroom, built in 2016, was the UK’s first energy-positive classroom or seminar space. The Active Office, which was constructed two years later, uses existing, commercially available technologies to achieve similar results.

Solar roofing panels feature quite highly but SUSTAIN, and the related SPECIFIC project, has developed panels that are greener, lighter, cheaper and more flexible than conventional versions: organic and non-organic hybrid perovskite solar cells. Materials like Tata Steel’s Colorcoat Prisma® pre-finished steel can be used under photovoltaic (PV) frame modules, making them highly efficient and flexible, allowing the buildings to generate their own electricity. The Active buildings are equipped with technologies to store and release energy as needed. The Active Office’s steel roof with integrated solar cells and batteries can store enough energy to power the building for two days.

The SUSTAIN group says that these technologies have the potential to revolutionise the construction industry by providing sustainable and energy-efficient building materials.

Warehouse decarbonisation – not just for today

Net-zero warehouses are designed to minimise carbon footprints throughout their lifecycle, from construction to operation and even to demolition.

Materials that offer lower carbon footprints include alternative cement mixes, which can significantly reduce overall embodied carbon, and green steel, which makes much use of scrap metal, and is thus regarded as lower-emission. Energy efficiency systems and structures includes things like solar panels, energy-efficient lighting and advanced insulation.

GREENSTEEL is helping to revolutionise methodology and thought in the construction industry. It offers a more sustainable alternative to traditional steel and is demonstrably practical and economical.

Contrary to concerns sometimes expressed, green steel provides the same strength and durability as traditional steel, but with a significantly lower carbon footprint.

Off-site manufacture, with assembly of buildings on-site from prefabricated beams, columns and panels, helps in reducing construction time and waste. Incorporating green steel into sustainable building designs contributes toward achieving certifications such as LEED and BREEAM. Such certifications also help to boost buildings’ market value.

Examples such as Magna Park and Schneider’s headquarters building in Paris, France, have achieved neutrality by effective management of energy consumption and by harvesting energy from occupants and activities. This can be as simple as, for example, harvesting the heat generated from the running of computers and servers. SUSTAIN is going further by making the buildings Smart.

It is still the case that transport is the highest emitter of carbon involved in logistics. Pressures in this area will continue to grow as we approach 2040. ‘Last mile’ demand is expected to increase by 78% by 2030, according to Sustainability magazine, leading to 36% more delivery vehicles operating in the world’s top 100 cities. The transport landscape will be transformed by 2040, at the latest, but buildings are designed to last for longer than vehicles. Attention must be paid to their environmental performance. The initiatives described here show how the industry as a whole, and the authorities, are treating the subject very seriously and are investing in a more sustainable future.