The above ground 3 storey red-brick walk-up with lift-up garage doors on the ground floor is possibly the most sustainable housing structure ever to be mass rolled out in the history of Australia. This red brick wonder is possibly more sustainable than houses as you have similar construction costs to houses but smaller construction cost per apartment than a house, smaller floor areas to heat and cool (if they are heated or cooled at all!) and when it comes to demolishing them, the cost is minimal. However, developers don’t seem to build red-brick or white-brick walkups any more. There are juicier profit margins in going bigger.

If we use an outlier, we can say that Ed. Square in Sydney’s south, which is a carbon neutral apartment complex of 2,000 residences is more sustainable at “run-time” or “operate-time” than the average house in Australia. However, there was a massive carbon cost in building this place.

All the other apartment blocks in Australia which aren’t red brick/white brick walk ups or marquee top end environmental developments are likely to be worse than the average house in terms of lifecycle of carbon emissions.

If we go to some Korean research “A Study on the Analysis of CO2 Emissions of Apartment Housing in the Construction Process” we find that re-inforced concrete during construction is responsible for 73% of the total carbon emissions during construction.

The load distance between the construction site and the steelworks or concrete manufacturer (when concrete is collected for reinforced concrete work), and the fuel efficiency of the transportation vehicles must be managed in order to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions in the construction process.

So, until we have solar-powered electric trucks moving steel from Bluescope (Port Kembla) to Sydney’s apartment development sites, and solar powered electric vehicle concrete trucks delivering concrete to Sydney’s apartment development sites, it is safe to say that Sydney based apartments are less sustainable than the average house in Sydney.