Carbon

2025 Impact Report

2025 Impact Report

At Hassell, we’re committed to understanding and minimising the impact of our work to ensure a healthy world for generations to follow. 

Our Sustainability Framework’s carbon category encompasses three key principles: Materials, Water and Energy. Each represents a critical opportunity to reduce emissions, from specifying low-carbon materials and implementing water-sensitive design to creating energy-efficient spaces powered by renewables. 

The following pages detail our carbon performance across our portfolio, showcasing our progress toward our embodied and operational carbon targets. We demonstrate how we’re helping clients achieve their climate goals through innovative, low-carbon design solutions that remain beautiful, functional and cost-effective. By reporting this data, we hold ourselves accountable to continuous improvement, acknowledging the challenges while maintaining our commitment to meaningful carbon reduction. 

“We have a business and moral imperative to facilitate conversations and foster cross-collaboration to drive this change within the industry.”

Liz Westgarth

Reducing waste through adaptive reuse

Repurposing an existing building has the potential to reduce carbon by 50% - 75% when compared to building from the ground up.

If the construction industry prioritised a reuse-first mentality, the carbon savings could be enormous. 

Adaptive reuse holds significant importance for numerous reasons. It preserves the cultural heritage of a building while simultaneously regenerating it and extending the duration of its useful life. This approach can reduce construction costs, conserve materials and minimise a project’s environmental impact by avoiding demolition. 

The waste reduction benefits of adaptive reuse are also significant. Research has found that up to 90% of an existing building’s materials can be diverted from landfill when a building is reused. Prioritising reuse first benefits the planet, communities, and future tenants.

The Michael Kirby Building at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia on Dharug Country is an adaptive reuse project that transformed a 1985 administration building. Hassell retained the existing concrete structure, added two timber-framed storeys, and converted an under-utilised courtyard into a naturally ventilated atrium, creating a flexible four-storey education space.

Putting circularity into practice 

Hassell approaches design through a circular economy lens, creating systems where materials retain their value and waste is eliminated entirely. Given that 45% of global emissions stem from how we make and use things (including food), it’s clear that transitioning to a sustainable world requires far more than renewable energy alone.

Circular thinking moves beyond traditional sustainability. It redefines how we design, build and operate – shifting from a linear model to one that’s regenerative by design. By eliminating waste and pollution at the source, we reduce emissions across entire value chains. Keeping materials and products in use at their highest possible value preserves embodied energy and reduces the demand for virgin resources.

It also reflects a deeper responsibility to the natural systems we work within. Moving beyond the take – make – waste model, we’re evolving toward practices that enable biodiversity to thrive. Regenerating natural systems within our projects isn’t just about carbon – it’s about creating the conditions for life to flourish. These strategies complement the renewable energy transition by addressing the significant, often overlooked emissions embedded in materials, production and consumption across the built environment.

This Melbourne workplace in Australia demonstrates circular design principles by transforming eight tonnes of waste glass into terrazzo flooring and reusing existing furniture and timber elements, achieving a 100-tonne CO₂ reduction while diverting substantial waste from landfill.

Designing for disassembly

Good design must carefully consider and plan for what happens when a building reaches the end of its life. This approach ensures that materials retain their value and become part of circular systems rather than resulting in waste and excessive emissions.

Design for deconstruction challenges conventional design by planning for a building’s end-of-life from the start. At its core, this means we design for reversible systems: selecting bolts and screws over chemical and welded bonds; ensuring materials and connections are documented for easy and quick removal at end-of-life; and separating systems into non-structural elements to allow for repairs, upgrades and changes. The design of components determines how likely they are to be reused. For instance, leaving bolts exposed rather than recessed in timber ensures elements can be easily disassembled and reused, keeping them out of landfill.

This approach doesn’t just reduce waste. It fundamentally transforms how we think about materials. Components designed for disassembly maintain their integrity and value throughout their lifecycle, making them ideal candidates for reuse in future projects. It’s a design philosophy that recognises our world as a closed-loop system where materials and resources are finite, demonstrating that a better way of building isn’t just possible, but achievable right now.



Case studies

Dharug Country
Western Sydney, Australia

As the inaugural structure in Australia’s newest city of Bradfield, the First Building is designed to demonstrate how adaptable, modular design can meet today’s needs while preparing for the future, setting precedent for what may follow as the city grows.

The First Building embodies design for deconstruction at an urban scale. Its prefabricated timber structure employs entirely reversible connections, enabling the building to be disassembled, expanded or relocated as the surrounding city evolves. Domestically sourced structural timber works alongside European CLT, showcasing the viability of local timber whilst challenging conventional supply chains. The use of this material resulted in a 50% reduction in embodied carbon.

ond its technical achievements, the building proves that circular design principles enhance rather than constrain architectural ambition. The design was informed by First Nations cultural research and design agency Djinjama and strongly ties ideas of the circular economy with cycles of ecology. The integration of passive design strategies, renewable energy systems and native landscaping creates a structure that’s both environmentally responsive and operationally efficient, establishing a new benchmark for how cities can grow sustainably. 

Explore the project
 

Wurundjeri Country, Melbourne, Australia

Around 90% of materials from the base build fit-out were reused or recycled in this renewed workplace, showcasing lean and efficient design.

Within its humble exterior, Australia Post’s new home unfolds as a welcoming space, encouraging deeper connections among its employees, customers, and the wider community.

Moving from its traditional corporate tower in the city to a warehouse-inspired workplace in the suburbs, Australia Post’s ambitious new support centre represents a fundamental rethinking of how the national postal service operates and interacts with the Australian public. 

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In our practice
Beyond our projects, we are committed to understanding our operational impact and taking meaningful steps forward.

We’ve been measuring the greenhouse gas emissions from our operations and supply chain since 2007, giving us insight into where we have an impact and where we can take action.

We have developed our climate strategy for the near and long term, with our achievement of Climate Active certification for carbon-neutral status as an important initial step. This provides us not only with a recognised process for addressing our emissions footprint over time, but also a means to provide transparency on our approach. Our disclosure under Climate Active can be found here: Hassell | Climate Active

In the last few years, we have implemented a number of initiatives to reduce our emissions impact. We have transitioned our Sydney and Melbourne studios to a GreenPower energy arrangement, joining our Brisbane and London studios, and bringing us to four studios powered with 100% renewable tenancy electricity. For our remaining studios, we continue to purchase renewable electricity certificates to achieve 100% renewable tenancy electricity across all our locations. In our Perth studio, the building’s hot water system was changed from natural gas to electric, an important step forward in reducing our scope one emissions towards zero.

But it doesn’t stop there. Beyond our studio operations, we’ve also introduced a Sustainable Procurement Strategy that sets out expectations for climate action by our suppliers, to measure and reduce their operational and supply chain emissions. This is now being rolled out to our key vendors and suppliers.

We’ve made a start on our climate strategy, but we recognise that corporate travel and our engagement with professional services are significant sources of emissions. We will continue to refine our approach to address these areas.

A continued environmental challenge for us is our reliance on air travel to meet with our valued clients and partners. During the COVID-19 pandemic our emissions from air travel were significantly reduced (FY22: 460.05 tCO2-e); however, they returned to pre-pandemic levels in recent years (FY23: 943.18 tCO2-e, FY24: 1,578.21 tCO2-e). Our climate strategy includes a focus on reducing transport emissions, including developing policy guidelines to reduce our extent of corporate travel emissions. These include encouraging employees to use virtual meeting technology, in lieu of travel, placing suitable and pragmatic requirements on flight classes, and limiting travel for non-project-related purposes.

As a provider of design and architecture professional services, the operational impact associated with our water consumption is low across our eight studios (see table below). We continue to take steps to reduce our water usage, including maintenance and use of water-efficient appliances and fittings. As water meter data is not available across all our studios, we continue to refine our water consumption estimation methodology to produce reliable data to monitor our impact.

In all our studios, we maintain multiple waste stream collection points to provide for the responsible disposal of waste generated in our operations, including mixed recycling, paper and cardboard, general waste/​landfill, and, where available, food waste and organics. In our Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth studios, we have partnered with suitable organisations for the collection of container deposit scheme items, fostering improved uptake of recycling and providing donations to the community.

We worked with building management in our Perth studio to utilise newly installed waste weighing scales, providing us with accurate data on our waste generation, disaggregated by waste stream. For FY25, we received our first full 12 months of waste data, which has been used to estimate waste generation across our studios globally. For waste in our supply chain, we have embedded consideration of supplier environmental practices, including waste management, within our Sustainable Procurement Strategy. This strategy provides guidance and support to our people on how to make informed and environmentally conscious decisions when purchasing products and services for our practice.

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