How metrics and data influence our approach to sustainabiltiy

The following includes extracts from an article published by EKOS in March 2025. A link will be provided to the original soon.

Today Breen  is a large provincial building business, with a 250 strong team that covers a lot of ground.  Our tean 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, our team knew it had to act.  Yet we also knew the task of rolling initiatives out across our large team and with our geographic spread, would present challenges.

We took a pragmatic approach to sustainability, focussing 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 our 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.

We partnered with EKOS to calculate current emissions and build a profile of where we could make the most impact. Vehicle emissions, building waste and building methodology were identified as priorities.

We knew we would need a target. In 2021, we agreed to cut carbon by 42% by 2030 (adjusted for growth). This ambitious target, alongside the calculations and priorities identified by EKOS, were the impetus for change.

Starting with vehicles, we began to plan how to 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 our fleet. With hybrids and EV’s now common for management, we have also 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 systemised program of work, supported by Katrine Gellatly (Breen’s Sustainabiltiy Advisor), has resulted in less landfill waste across our business, alongside a broader and more thorough approach to recycling across 80 + sites. Thanks to monthly reporting, we can now analyse 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 our team. Figuring out how to build the unique climactic demands of each location – such as allowing for the extreme temperature changes in Central Otago – has been a key consideration for Breen since the company’s inception.

However, planning to build better – to improve metrics related to embodied carbon, and ongoing energy efficiency – 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, our in-house design team modelled the impact different design and specification choices 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 exact site and orientation of the building, within 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. Learn more about this build by watching our video.

Our ambitions to reduce carbon has focused on continuous improvement using data and metrics to guide decisions. We have a blueprint for sustainability; one that is focused on the impact our business can have. As an intergenerational business, we understands the role we can play and the impact a business of our size can have within the communities where we work.