The Federation of Piling Specialists has completed the UK's first comprehensive review of embodied carbon in specialist foundations, giving piling and ground engineering contractors a data-backed baseline just as government policy on mandatory carbon reporting remains stalled.

The Federation of Piling Specialists, founded in 1964 and based in Kent, is the UK's trade association for piling and foundation contractors, whose members are independently audited on quality, safety and environmental management.

The review drew on data from 63 projects delivered by FPS member contractors in 2025, covering a combined turnover of £618m (€722m), and found that members generated some 330,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent across those schemes.

To account for variation in scale, ground conditions and technique across foundation projects, the FPS Sustainability Committee benchmarked emissions against multiple measures, including carbon per £1m of turnover, per hour worked and per cubic metre of concrete installed.

The dataset amounts to industry self-regulation filling a gap that government policy has declined to close, giving piling contractors a working baseline well ahead of any statutory requirement to have one.

Ministers confirmed in March 2026 that they would not mandate whole-life carbon assessments in building projects, keeping reporting voluntary despite a parliamentary committee having called mandatory assessment the single most significant policy available to decarbonise construction, and despite the UK's annual embodied carbon emissions being estimated at 64 million tonnes, more than aviation and shipping combined.

Foundations sit at the sharp end of that figure, since piling and ground engineering are among the most concrete and steel-intensive stages of any project, making a specialist benchmark more useful to specifiers than a generic whole-building carbon figure.

For the sector, voluntary datasets like this one are becoming the practical substitute for regulation: clients, designers and frameworks are increasingly asking for carbon data on tender, and contractors that can already benchmark their performance against a recognised industry baseline will be better placed to win that work than those waiting for Part Z or an equivalent rule to force the issue.

Source: Construction Management / CIBSE Journal