If embodied carbon is on the brief, ReFramed has a clear case to make. This page walks through how it compares to aluminium baselines, and what your LCA practitioner needs if you're working toward Green Star Fitouts Credit 27.

Context

Credit 27 under Green Star Fitouts v1 rewards projects whose fitout delivers lower upfront embodied carbon than a reference fitout. Reductions are calculated via the GBCA Upfront Carbon and Circularity Calculator or a comparative LCA.

Internal partitions sit within Credit 27's scope, and the scale is what makes them worth looking at closely: a single corridor of meeting rooms can run to hundreds of lineal metres, and ReFramed's carbon advantage stacks up on every one of them.

What the numbers show

Everyone knows aluminium carries more embodied carbon than timber. What's less obvious is how much more. Crafted Hardwoods' Blackbutt is verified at 0.50 kg CO₂e per kilogram, A1–A3. That's 60 times lower than the worst-case aluminium baseline, 36 times lower than the industry average, and 16 times lower than Capral LocAl Green, the lowest-carbon aluminium available as standard in Australia.

A note on comparison boundaries

These figures are billet-stage, A1–A3, meaning they capture the feedstock material before extrusion, machining, or finishing. That's standard practice: aluminium manufacturers don't typically publish product-level carbon data for partition systems, and the industry-wide disclosures that do exist (such as Capral's LocAl) stop at the billet stage. NABERS figures are the most defensible reference available for that comparison.

Crafted Hardwoods' timber is independently verified at the same A1–A3 stage, making this a direct, like-for-like comparison.

The comparison is conservative. Here's why.

The figures above stop before extrusion and powder coating on the aluminium side, or machining and finishing on the timber side. That's a fair boundary, but it's worth knowing what comes next. Aluminium extrusion is an energy-intensive thermal process. Powder coating uses heat-cured ovens. Timber machining and finishing require neither. So the gap you see in the table is the floor, not the ceiling. Timber's advantage grows from here.

How your LCA practitioner uses this data

The billet-stage figure is expressed per kilogram. To turn that into a partition-level comparison, your practitioner combines it with two project-specific inputs: how much framing the design uses and how much that framing weighs.

In practice: measure total lineal metres of glazed partition framing, calculate mass from profile dimensions and timber density, then multiply by the carbon factor for each material. Do that for both the aluminium reference and the ReFramed proposal, and you have your comparison in kg CO₂e.

The aluminium carbon factor will shift slightly depending on which source your practitioner uses. NABERS is free, publicly accessible, and published by a nationally recognised Australian government program. Other tools like eTool draw from AusLCI. The specific number varies, but the direction of the comparison doesn't change.

Across the three baselines, ReFramed series 90 delivers between 78% and 94% lower embodied carbon per lineal metre than an aluminium frame of comparable size.

How a Credit 27 submission comes together

ReFramed won't single-handedly deliver a Credit 27 point. The credit rewards projects whose proposed fitout has measurably lower upfront carbon than a reference fitout, calculated across all materials. Within that calculation, some specification changes move the needle harder than others. ReFramed is one of them.

What Crafted Hardwoods provides

A1–A3 Product Carbon Footprint data
Product specifications and weight per lineal metre for the relevant ReFramed profile series

What the project team calculates

Total mass of framing for both the reference aluminium system and the proposed ReFramed system, based on lineal metres and profile dimensions.
Full A1–A5 fitout carbon comparison including A4 (transport to site) and A5 (installation), using project-specific data.

Reference vs proposed fitout comparison via the GBCA Upfront Carbon & Circularity Calculator or a comparative LCA, with aluminium reference inputs drawn from NABERS or other recognised datasets.

One thing the calculator doesn't capture

One further point worth naming: the biogenic carbon stored in the timber itself sits outside the calculation entirely. Credit 27 doesn't account for this, and nor does the fossil A1–A3 scope. It's a separate conversation, but a real one. Every lineal metre of ReFramed holds atmospheric carbon out of circulation for the life of the partition.

Get in touch

If you're targeting Credit 27 and considering ReFramed, send through your floor plan or partition schedule. We'll come back with a carbon comparison based on your actual framing run and our verified PCF, so you can see the impact before you commit to the specification.

ReFramed & upfront carbon reduction in Green Star Fitouts