A council’s comment that imported granite being used to pave Exhibition Road in London has a lower carbon footprint than British stone because it arrived on a slow boat from China has caused some concern in the British stone industry.

The council’s view was reported in the London Evening Standard on 3 September under the headline: ‘Why Exhibition Road is made in China’.

The report says the £29million hard landscaping project on one of London’s most famous streets – used by 20million visitors a year to attractions such as the Natural History Museum – is using granite imported from China.

The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Council is reported as claiming the carbon footprint of the imported stone is less than it would have been had the granite come from “the North of England”.

The explanation for its low carbon footprint is given as being because it has travelled to the UK so slowly by boat.

English Stone Forum plan to respond to the newspaper report and will discuss the issue at their next meeting. Meanwhile, Portland limestone producers Albion Stone have written to the council challenging the assertion that the imported stone has a smaller carbon footprint than British stone. They quote the Historic Scotland Embodied Carbon report (see NSS June issue) that showed how shipping alone involved in bringing stone from China can make the embodied carbon level of the stone as much as 553% greater than that of indigenous stone. Albion also referred the council to the Stone Federation publication Selecting the Correct Stone.

English Stone Forum say the point behind their concerns is that councils are supposed to be taking a responsible approach to sourcing materials, considering issues including the carbon footprint of materials being used.

The Forum say this is not the only instance they are aware of where councils have been prepared to accept spurious information about imported stone.

The fact that Kensington & Chelsea Council were looking for granite in ‘the North of England’ also raises concerns at the Forum about how much effort the council had really put into sourcing British materials, as appropriate granite was more likely to come from Cornwall than the North.

David Richardson, Director of Construction Consultancy at the BRE and a former President of Stone Federation Great Britain, says the Federation and BRE would ask clients to use robust, evidence-based arguments regarding the materials that are specified.

He says councils have to become “informed clients” and the Federation has commissioned BRE to produce a report intended to help the industry to inform clients better about the sustainability of stone. The report would be delivered to the Federation shortly.

He explained: “Stone is, on the one hand, quite simple, but it is quite complex when it comes to life cycle analysis profiling.”