The market outlook for sustainable construction is being reshaped by rapid advances in renewable building materials. Hempcrete is drawing global attention for its ability to store carbon while delivering strong performance in low carbon building applications. Forecasts show rising adoption of hempcrete from 2025 to 2033, positioning it as a leading choice for eco-friendly construction and a driver of lower embodied carbon in materials. The sector increasingly views such innovations as pivotal to meeting net zero whole life carbon ambitions.

At the same time, the UK construction industry is experiencing a prolonged downturn, with activity declining for an eighth consecutive month. This has serious implications for investment in sustainable building practices and the scale-up of life cycle thinking in construction. A restricted market makes it harder to fund whole life carbon assessment, yet the demand for sustainable building design and more effective lifecycle assessment remains urgent if the carbon footprint of construction is to be reduced.

A shift in steelmaking marks one of the most significant positive developments. Tata Steel’s decision to install an electric arc furnace in the UK highlights a decisive move toward low embodied carbon materials. With construction consuming large quantities of steel, this transition directly supports embodied carbon reduction and decarbonising the built environment. Cleaner steel production plays a critical role in achieving resource efficiency in construction and in lowering the environmental impact of construction supply chains globally.

Innovation from cleantech startups is complementing these larger transitions. Through Amazon’s Sustainability Accelerator, high-potential companies are advancing circular economy solutions and using AI to improve material reuse. These approaches directly address building lifecycle performance and end-of-life reuse in construction, helping the industry to adopt circular construction strategies with measurable benefits in whole life carbon reduction.

Energy and emissions policy remains another pressure point. Falling emissions from North Sea oil and gas reveal progress, yet not enough to meet long-term targets. For the construction sector, this underscores the tightening regulatory environment, reinforcing that eco-design for buildings, sustainable material specification and low carbon design must become standard practice. Regulatory scrutiny will focus on the environmental sustainability in construction, demanding consistent use of environmental product declarations (EPDs) and rigorous whole life carbon assessment to demonstrate compliance.

Policy experiments abroad offer further lessons. Dutch efforts to use taxation to curb pollution may trigger unintended consequences in waste management. The potential for “waste tourism” illustrates the complexity of aligning waste policy with broader circular economy in construction goals. Achieving net zero carbon buildings requires not just technological solutions but also joined-up governance that ensures environmental sustainability in construction and genuine carbon footprint reduction across the sector.