Breen Construction

Step by step – How metrics and data influence Breen’s approach to sustainability initiatives. 

Breen Construction began as a local contractor in 1939 and today is a large provincial building business, with a 250-person strong team that covers a lot of ground. The team can be found working in remote, off-the-grid locations as well as in rural townships and regional hubs across the lower South Island.  

When the call to focus more heavily on sustainability initiatives came to the fore, the Breen team knew it had to act.  Yet they also knew the task of rolling initiatives out across its large team and with its geographic spread would present challenges.  

The team therefore took a pragmatic approach to sustainability, focusing efforts using three key principles: 

• Take ownership – understand what Breen has control over. Educate and influence the market only when it feels it has tested, proven and adopted lessons within its own business. 

• Measure and use data to inform and enable change across the business, balancing immediate cost implications against longer term gains. 

• Adapt, evolve and update continuously.   

The team partnered with Ekos to calculate current emissions and build a profile of where it could make the most impact. Vehicle emissions, building waste and building methodology were identified as priorities.  

To begin, the Breen team knew it would need a target. In 2021, they agreed to cut carbon by 42% by 2030. This ambitious target, alongside the calculations and priorities identified by Ekos, were the impetus for change. 

Starting with vehicles, Breen began to plan how it would transition a large fleet of combustion engines to a mix including EV and Hybrid options where distance between jobs, towing capacity and access to charging stations were key factors. Ekos’s annual reporting, alongside a continued focus on the drive range and towing capacity of EV’s and hybrids, has seen a marked change in the mix of vehicles in the Breen fleet. With hybrids and EV’s now common for management, the team installed EV charging stations and ports at all offices and yards across the lower South Island, and four fast chargers in Alexandra, also available for public use.  

The next priority was methodically reducing building waste.   

Head to any one of Breen’s yards and you will find a range of salvaged items from rebar to conduit, recycled woods to mantels, floorboards and more. Yet while the Breen team already had a culture of reusing materials that goes back decades, early recycling efforts were largely driven by foremen and project managers who prioritized recycling and reuse.  

The introduction of a systemized program of work, supported by Katrine Gellatly (sustainability consultant in Alexandra), has resulted in less landfill waste across the business, alongside a broader and more thorough approach to recycling across 80 + sites. Thanks to monthly reporting, the team now analyses waste data regularly to recognize progress and identify obstacles early.  

Building methodology has arguably been the most complex piece of the journey so far for Breen. Figuring out how to build the unique climatic demands of each location – such as allowing for the extreme temperature changes in Central Otago which has been a key consideration for the Breen team since the company’s inception. 

However, planning to build better - to improve metrics related to carbon embodiment, and ongoing energy efficiency it required not just a hypothesis using specific data and insight but also a test build. 

Thus, Breen became both the contractor and the client.  Working closely with Sustainable Engineering, Breen’s in-house design team modelled the impact of different design and specification choices which would have against likely returns. They assessed factors such as running costs and usability of the building over its lifetime.  

The result? The financial costs required to achieve full passive certification greatly outweigh the benefits that could be achieved by specifying a building just under this qualification (*note, these calculations were specific to the Wanaka climate.)  This insight has set the stage for informed decision-making at the concept stage – decisions that will have a positive impact on both environmental considerations as well as client budgets. 

Breen’s ambitions to reduce carbon has focused on continuous improvement using data and metrics to guide decisions. The team has a blueprint for sustainability; one that is focused on the impact the Breen business can have. As an intergenerational business, it understands the role it can play and the impact a business of its size can have within the communities it works in. 

With time, the team expect to use its increasing cache of domain knowledge to help not just its own team, but clients and the community to leverage the benefits of its learning also.