Published 18 March 2025
Industry: Built Environment and Construction
Platform Use Cases: Company-level Reporting, Project-level Reporting, Contractor Engagement, Scope 3 Calculation
“ESGpedia has been instrumental in transforming our approach to sustainability, by supporting our business in ensuring compliance with global sustainability standards. The enhanced accuracy in carbon footprint calculation has provided us a deeper understanding of our company’s environmental impact, enabling more efficient practices and fostering a culture of transparency and accountability in our operations.”
- Victoria Tan, Deputy Director of Corporate Development, Teambuild Construction Group
“We have enhanced our attractiveness and competitiveness in project tenders with ESGpedia as our sustainability reporting partner. This has led to higher success rates in securing projects, especially those with ESG requirements.”
- Toh Chee Boon, Deputy Managing Director, Hi-Tek Construction
Decarbonising the Built Environment
A sustainable built environment has become increasingly attractive in recent years, with proven long-term operational cost savings and project tenders calling for green criteria.
Understanding Carbon Emissions in the Built Environment
The built environment, which accounts for almost 40% of global energy related emissions, plays a crucial role in driving the world’s progress towards net zero.
Buildings are a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, which can be further categorised into embodied carbon emissions and operational carbon emissions.
On the other hand, operational carbon emissions are the emissions associated with operational activities such as heating, electricity, lighting systems, equipment, and lifts.
However, embodied carbon emissions are typically harder to tackle, with carbon emissions involved at every stage of construction and complex supply chains complicating data gathering processes.
Growing Demand for a Green Built Environment
Others raised a lack of understanding around how to take meaningful action, a lack of appropriate industry guidance and frameworks, especially for SMEs, and difficulties in challenging or changing established organisational culture and behaviour.
These obstacles are no stranger to built environment industries across Asia. For instance, some project developers in Asia remain hesitant to adopt lower-carbon materials due to their higher upfront costs and a perception that these alternatives lack the quality and durability compared to traditional materials like cement and aluminium.
Similarly, in Singapore where buildings account for 20% of national carbon emissions, the industry faces a lack of awareness of what it means to green a building, due to complex ecosystems and carbon emissions involved at every step of a building’s life cycle.
However, demand for greener buildings in both public and private tenders has grown significantly over the years, with the Singapore government including environmental criteria for government projects starting from 2024.
Developers and construction companies face pressure to track and demonstrate their sustainability commitment, in order to maintain competitiveness in the industry and secure more business.
We examine the success stories of seven prominent, home-grown construction companies in Singapore – Expand Construction, Hi-Tek Construction, Kimly Construction, Ngai Chin Construction, Soilbuild Construction Group, Teambuild Construction Group, and Wee Hur Construction – which have leveraged solutions on the ESGpedia platform to achieve their various Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals, positioning themselves as sustainability leaders in the built environment.
Generating Full Company-level Sustainability Reports In Accordance with International and Local Standards
– Expand Construction, Hi-Tek Construction
Navigating the Complexities of Sustainability Reporting
Sustainability reports transparently communicate an organisation’s ESG efforts and impacts to stakeholders such as customers, investors, financiers, and employees.
Generating a comprehensive company-level sustainability report for the first time is not an easy task, and many companies in the built environment face a variety of difficulties such as lack of expertise, insufficient industry benchmarks, complexities in calculating embodied carbon emissions, and tedious and highly manual processes involving large datasets.
Lack of Expertise
Expand Construction’s extensive portfolio includes Housing Development Board’s (HDB) Public Housing projects, infrastructure projects like the ongoing NS Square at Marina Bay, the Changi Naval Base, and iconic structural projects like the Supertree Grove at Gardens by the Bay and the Natural History Museum at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
“Creating the Sustainability Report was certainly not an easy task as it was our first time. We lacked the expertise to do so and were unsure of what to include in the report.”
- Kenneth Siew, Executive Director, Expand Construction
Accounting for Embodied Carbon Emissions
For Hi-Tek Construction, a private company specialising in HDB Build-to-Order (BTO) and Home Improvement Programme (HIP) projects, creating their first sustainability report was aligned with their vision to enhance efficiency, transparency, and long-term environmental responsibility.
Hi-Tek Construction encountered difficulties in calculating and reporting their full emissions generated from projects utilising productivity-improving technology such as robots for internal unit spray painting for a comprehensive assessment of the company’s carbon footprint.
“One challenge we faced was calculating the embodied carbon emissions produced by robots and other related environmental impacts.”
- Toh Chee Boon, Deputy Managing Director, Hi-Tek Construction
Expand Construction faced similar issues, having embarked on the redevelopment of Singapore’s national landmark, NS Square. The waste generated from demolishing of the existing building was recycled and reused in the new NS Square – debris was turned into granite, the floating platform transformed into a side office, and steel bars were melted and churned out for a new lease of life.
“The key challenge we faced was the complexity of calculating embodied carbon emissions for various recycled products when accounting for the project’s total carbon emissions for the year.”
- Kenneth Siew, Executive Director, Expand Construction
With multiple construction projects ongoing simultaneously, construction groups like Expand Construction and Hi-Tek Construction face difficulties in carbon calculations, having to deal with disparate datasets and limited expertise to best quantify and present their sustainability efforts.
Simplifying Sustainability Reporting with Digital Tools
To effectively navigate the complexities of gathering ESG data, Expand Construction and Hi-Tek Construction leveraged ESGpedia’s Sustainability Reporting tool to streamline the end-to-end sustainability reporting process.
From in-built capabilities to manage the large amounts of data to extracting and auto-filling of relevant field and information, both companies were able to reduce much time and effort needed compared to manual entry. Human error was also reduced significantly.
Additionally, both local and internationally recognised standards such as GRI, ISSB, and SASB are integrated into the ESGpedia platform, ensuring the sustainability reports produced for Expand Construction and Hi-Tek Construction are in alignment with and accurately mapped to the required standards.
Having started their sustainability journey in compliance with ISO14001 and Green and Gracious Builder Scheme requirements, Expand Construction was able to easily churn out data from their projects and financial systems with the help of ESGpedia’s platform, completing their 2024 Sustainability Report in approximately two weeks – well within the month-long timeline they had originally set.
Toh Chee Boon, Deputy Managing Director of Hi-Tek Construction, explained: “These informed investment decisions are key to convincing stakeholders to invest in technologies and further sustainability initiatives, creating a roadmap for future improvement for Hi-Tek Construction.”
Despite not having sustainability personnel or expertise within their teams, both construction companies were able to successfully publish their sustainability reports and gain better insights into their carbon emissions.
The streamlined generation of sustainability reports for businesses enabled them to showcase their commitment to investors and customers, work towards green certifications, and set active pathways towards their decarbonisation targets.
Kenneth Siew of Expand Construction shared, “ESGpedia provided us with an automated, guided, and simple way to calculate our carbon emissions across Scope 1 to 3, converting operational data into emission figures, and allowing us to have better insights into our carbon emissions.”
Generating Project-level Embodied Carbon Reports
– Soilbuild Construction Group, Ngai Chin Construction
Companies in the built environment are subject to project-level reporting, to account for the environmental impact of individual construction sites.
Having to calculate and report different aspects of each construction project such as energy usage, waste, and material emissions poses a significant challenge to most built and construction businesses today, due to the high complexity.
Complexity in Accounting for Impact of Various Projects Due to Varied Operations and Project Types
Additionally, benchmarking also needs to account for changes in company portfolio size and composition of projects over time, to ensure that positive progress in sustainability performance at project levels are accounted for and reflected properly in the reporting process.
Soilbuild Construction Group is a SGX-listed construction company mainly focused on industrial building projects, with nine ongoing projects including a Green Mark Zero Energy, LEED Zero, a warehouse at Tampines LogisPark, two Green Mark Platinum Super Low Energy projects – one of which is Port of Singapore (PSA) International’s Supply Chain Hub, and HDB projects.
“Finding comparable industry benchmarks proved to be difficult. We realised that the environmental impact of different project types (residential, industrial, and commercial) varied, making accurate assessment of overall project performance challenging.”
- Han Ren, Executive Director and Group CEO, Soilbuild Construction
Complex Data Collection
In data collection for Soilbuild’s project-level reporting, the group faced challenges such as having to manually trace emails, compile previous years’ data into error-prone excel spreadsheets, and subsequent formatting of this data for analysis.
For Ngai Chin Construction, an SME specialising in interior fittings of commercial office spaces with close to 40 years of experience in project and construction management, inconsistent data formats from suppliers and subcontractors compromised their data collection process for project-level reporting.
“They use different systems, leading to varying data formats and issues with data accuracy and reliability.”
- Clifton Chong, Sustainability Lead, Ngai Chin Construction
Automated Generation of Embodied Carbon Reports (Project-level)
To overcome these data challenges and ensure the accuracy of disclosures, both Ngai Chin and Soilbuild kickstarted their embodied carbon emissions reporting and subcontractor engagement with ESGpedia.
Using ESGpedia’s digital platform, Ngai Chin Construction was able to easily generate an Embodied Carbon Report on a project level for an office refurbishment project they had carried out for a large corporate entity.
Ngai Chin Construction invited their subcontractors and suppliers to input data from the project, including emissions produced from furniture, fittings disposed, recycled materials, diesel usage, transport, and more – effectively capturing the full GHG emissions from stages A1 to A5 and allowing them to have a comprehensive overview of the life cycle emissions of the project.
“As an SME, we often lack resources and expertise to effectively measure our sustainability progress. With growing focus on sustainability from clients and the government, ESGpedia has empowered us on our sustainability journey.”
- Clifton Chong, Sustainability Lead, Ngai Chin Construction
Similarly, Soilbuild Construction leveraged the digital platform to streamline the project-level embodied carbon reporting process for their wide portfolio of projects.
By working with the ESGpedia team, the team was able to define the parameters of data collection within the platform, input relevant data, and have their emissions automatically calculated and categorised by Scope of emissions.
The customisable dashboard also simplified data visualisation, allowing the team to have clearer insights into various projects and easily identify areas for improvement. This data can then be easily retrieved for the company’s annual sustainability reporting.
Han Ren, Executive Director and Group CEO of Soilbuild Construction Group, shared: “We have always been forward-looking and interested in new clean technology that could further our decarbonisation goals on site. Having project-level reports will provide valuable insights and guide our next steps which we are excited to embark on.”
The ESGpedia platform empowered these construction companies by boosting their confidence in engaging with clients, driving their sustainability efforts with real-time ESG insights at a project level.
Active Engagement with Subcontractors for Full Value Chain Decarbonisation
– Kimly Construction, Teambuild Construction Group, Soilbuild Construction
Challenging Data Collection from Subcontractors and Suppliers
For the built sector, the large number of participants in each project poses a difficulty for main contractors or developers to gain visibility over every stakeholder’s decarbonisation efforts, especially since many subcontractors employ their own subcontractors as well.
Subcontractors in the value chain also must be convinced of the benefits of green building methods and carbon accounting, and be willing to collaborate to attain sustainability goals.
Kimly Construction is an established Singapore-based company known for its expertise in residential, commercial, and institutional building projects. Since its founding in 1965, the company has built a strong reputation for delivering high quality developments with involvement in both public housing and private sector projects.
With a goal to meet the regulatory deadline to disclose sustainability reports by 2027, Kimly Construction set out to embark on their carbon accounting and sustainability reporting journey.
Due to a perceived impression that sustainability was ‘nice-to-have’ across their value chains, misinterpretations and misalignments in expectations arose in efforts to seek cooperation from different departments and projects.
“Carbon accounting was often laborious and manual because it was previously done using excel for data entry, tracking, analysis, and carbon reporting. This often led to a lack of accountability and communication breakdown.”
- Justin Chew, Senior Manager of Enterprise Sustainability & Corporate QA/QC at Kimly Construction Group, and Head of Kimly Academy
Teambuild Construction Group faced obstacles similar in nature to those of Kimly Construction, in efficiently gathering data from various projects and partners.
Founded in 1992, Teambuild Construction Group specialises in residential, institutional, and industrial projects, priding itself on being an innovation-driven organisation and continuously seeking new ways to improve construction processes through technology, robotics, and automation.
Victoria Tan, Deputy Director of Corporate Development at Teambuild Construction Group, shared that “The lack of industry benchmarks hindered our ability to effectively track and manage environmental impacts effectively. The process was manually intensive, relying heavily on disparate data sources and time-consuming compilations.”
Teambuild Construction, as per majority of built companies today, relied heavily on excel spreadsheets to manage their carbon accounting and reporting efforts, which required substantial hours and resulted in an increased likelihood of errors and inconsistencies in their reports.
Collecting data from several residential projects such as Grove Spring at Yishun and Punggol at Northshore Edge was challenging for the company, complicated by the need to coordinate simultaneously with numerous subcontractors and suppliers.
Simplified Subcontractor/Supplier Engagement with a Co-branded Portal
A key technology-driven solution for these construction companies is the Co-branded Portal solution on ESGpedia, which empowers subcontractors and suppliers to be seamlessly onboarded onto the ESGpedia platform to input data required by the main contractors or developers.
Kimly Construction (kimly.esgpedia.io), Teambuild Construction (teambuild.esgpedia.io), and Soilbuild Construction (soilbuild.esgpedia.io) each launched a customised Co-branded landing page with ESGpedia, allowing them to actively engage their contractors.
Justin from Kimly Construction explained that the Co-branded Portal allowed them to “streamline the process of empowering subcontractors to calculate their emissions, from onboarding and data collection to monitoring, overall helping us to gain better visibility and manage our full value chain emissions.”
In addition to the Co-branded Portal, the ESGpedia team supported a sustainability workshop for Kimly Construction’s supply chain partners at the company’s first Sustainability Day. The workshop engaged their partners in understanding the ESG landscape and how they can streamline carbon accounting and reporting efforts with digital solutions.
Teambuild Construction was able to reduce the need for manual data entry and view real-time updates, effectively gaining a comprehensive picture of their full value chain reporting.
For Soilbuild Construction, the ESGpedia Co-Branded Portal enabled their upstream vendors to input consumption data directly, significantly reducing man-hours required for review and collation.
“ESGpedia empowered us to streamline our carbon accounting process and manage sustainability reporting more effectively. We can now actively engage our contractors, as well as collect and track their data, reducing the need for manual data entry and allowing for real-time updates and comprehensive full value chain reporting.”
- Victoria, Deputy Director of Corporate Development, Teambuild Construction Group
Scope 3 Calculations and Reporting
– Soilbuild Construction, Kimly Construction, Wee Hur Construction
For comprehensive reporting, businesses in the built environment need to attain a full overview of their supply chain’s emissions, or Scope 3 emissions, but face difficulty due to the complexity and resource-strapped nature of their subcontractors and suppliers.
The Housing Development Board (HDB) in Singapore has announced plans to track and disclose Scope 3 emissions, with a focus on emissions from their contractors’ activities on the various HDB projects, including Build-to-Order (BTO), Home Improvement Programme (HIP), Neighbourhood Renewal Programme (NRP), and more. This signals an industry move towards Scope 3 disclosures in the near future.
Scope 3 emissions tracking can be a tedious process, involving companies’ subcontractors – most of whom are unlikely to have started any form of carbon accounting due to the complexity of the process.
Soilbuild Construction and Kimly Construction, having embarked on their subcontractor and supplier engagement using the Co-branded Portals, have kickstarted their Scope 3 calculation and reporting for projects.
“Although we are tracking Scope 3 emissions for the first time for projects such as Tuas Port, the ESGpedia platform has made it easy to categorise carbon emissions, even breaking them down into the 15 sub-categories, which allows us to easily identify areas of improvement.”
- Han Ren, Executive Director and Group CEO, Soilbuild Construction
Kimly Construction has begun including their sustainability initiatives and reports when bidding for tenders, including their Scope 3 emissions tracking.
“There are many other considerations such as price and engineering proposals that can influence the tender outcome. Nevertheless, I believe our collective sustainable strategies offer intangible advantages in recent tenders.”
- Justin Chew, Senior Manager of Enterprise Sustainability & Corporate QA/QC at Kimly Construction Group, and Head of Kimly Academy
Wee Hur Construction Pte Ltd is a BCA registered contractor involved in a variety of construction projects from both the public and private sectors. The construction company builds workers’ dormitories, purpose-built student accommodation, and takes on commercial, industrial, religious, restoration, and restoration projects.
The SGX listed entity began tracking Scope 3 emissions – comprising subcontractor monthly diesel usage and internal waste generated, in compliance with reporting requirements for listed companies.
Access to subcontractors’ sustainability data was a key challenge the team faced in calculating Scope 3 emissions, as many of them did not see the value of a record-keeping approach for data.
However, leveraging ESGpedia’s Scope 3 Module, Wee Hur Construction was able to swiftly determine the type of data required to collect from their subcontractors, collect such data on a monthly basis from their subcontractors and head office, and upload the relevant data in a straightforward manner onto the platform, saving much time and effort. It is also now able to monitor its carbon emissions and compile annual and monthly data for ESG reporting and comparisons.
“ESGpedia has helped us to determine what type of data to collect for Scope 3, resolving the most challenging aspect for us. ESGpedia is a reliable platform for carbon accounting, allowing us to embark on Scope 3 reporting to fulfil tender sustainability criteria and comply with SGX listed company reporting criteria.”
- Tay Hock Joo, Chairperson of ESG Committee, Wee Hur Construction
Moving forward, Scope 3 calculation and reporting will become an essential part of climate disclosures across all industries.
Along with digital tools, collaboration across every stage of a business’ supply chain remains crucial for transparent and accurate disclosures.
Journeying with companies in the built environment to achieve sustainability goals
As sustainability criteria continue to grow in government tenders, it is inevitable that these requirements will in due course spill over into the private sector, with the demand for green buildings and construction increasing over time.
It is crucial for both developers and contractors to take their first steps towards sustainability early to ensure compliance, and advantage in winning tenders and procuring business deals, as the companies featured have done.
Looking ahead, as these major players in the built and construction sector continue to focus their efforts towards ESG compliance and excellence, ESGpedia will continue to support them, bridging the gaps and streamlining the end-to-end sustainability reporting process.