Masonry products manufacturer, Lignacite, has partnered with Hopkins Homes to provide Carbon Buster building blocks to new housing developments throughout East Anglia including Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire; significantly reducing the carbon footprint of the homes in the process.
The Carbon Buster block is the world’s first carbon negative building block and has been developed by Lignacite in partnership with Carbon8 Aggregates, using their award winning Accelerated Carbonation Technology.
The block incorporates more than 50% recycled materials and combines this with Carbon8’s carbonated aggregates derived from by-products from waste to energy plants. The result is a high performing masonry product, and the first ever building block, which has captured more carbon dioxide than is emitted during its manufacture; 14kg CO2 per tonne of blocks to be exact.
Hopkins Homes, which is one of the fastest growing property developers in the UK now uses Carbon Buster blocks in all their homes, which amounts to around 600 dwellings across 30 developments. This means that in the 25,000 square metres of Carbon Buster blocks supplied to Hopkins this year, 3,500 more tonnes of CO2 have been locked up in the blocks than were emitted by the manufacturing and delivery of these blocks. This is equivalent to saving the CO2 generated by nearly 2,000 cars in an average year.
“Every Hopkins Home features the strength and durability of traditional building styles and techniques fused with the latest modern technology, giving us the ability to provide energy savings by reducing heat loss and the emission of greenhouse gases. The use of Carbon Buster blocks help us reduce our houses’ overall carbon footprint and to meet and exceed existing building codes. This is becoming increasingly important to our customers, and makes the Carbon Buster an attractive product,” explains Simon Bryan, Development Director for Hopkins Homes.
“Another advantage of using Lignacite’s new blocks is the service provided by Lignacite, which, despite recent explosive growth, is still able to offer short lead times and quickly adapt to market demand,” Simon continues.
According to Chairman of Lignacite, Giles de Lotbiniere, the short lead times are a result of Lignacite’s purpose-built and modern manufacturing plants at Brandon in Suffolk, and Nazeing in Essex: “These are fully automated and have a combined production capacity of 21 million blocks per annum. The modern plants, recycled content and sourcing of aggregates from our own quarry, all help to minimise the carbon footprint of our products,” he says.