Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 2 July 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
Circular Economy as it relates to Construction Sector: Discussion
11:00 am
Mr. P.J. Ryan:
On the renovation piece, we need to be careful with renovation and embodied carbon. At the moment we are running out of serviced land that has infrastructure available. We need to be careful that we are not limiting what we can do on our city centre sites where we have a lot of infrastructure. We need to be careful there. Looking at a building on its own is fine. In that case, renovation is probably more carbon efficient. However, we might be able to say that the site could sustain a higher block of apartments, for example. If those apartments are not built on the city centre site but are built on a greenfield site and new infrastructure has to be installed there, it is more nuanced than simple saying that renovation is the solution because it saves carbon in the long run. Those considerations are important as well.