As a sponsor of the 2026 Sustainability Summit and Awards, CEO of CSR, Paul Dalton sits down with Architecture & Design to talk about the next chapter of decarbonising the built environment and why the most important sustainability decisions are increasingly being made on the factory floor and in the specification document.

Paul, can you start by telling us a bit about your role and how sustainability fits into the way CSR runs its business?
I am proud to lead CSR, one of Australia's largest building products manufacturers. Our brands Gyprock, Bradford, Hebel and PGH Bricks among them sit inside millions of Australian and New Zealand homes and workplaces. That gives us an enormous privilege, and a real responsibility. The decisions we make about how we source, design, manufacture and supply our products shape the way the country lives for generations.

Sustainability isn't a side project at CSR. It's the way we choose to do business. Our ESG strategy is built on six pillars, employee engagement and diversity, health and safety, climate change, circular economy, business ethics and inclusive growth, and they're aligned to our parent company Saint-Gobain's ambition to be the worldwide leader in light and sustainable construction, with net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Every product, every site, every relationship is measured against that.

How has the conversation about sustainability in building materials changed over the last few years?
It has matured significantly. Even five years ago, much of the conversation was about operational energy, how efficiently a finished building runs. That's still important, but the focus has expanded to embodied carbon, the carbon locked into the materials we use to build in the first place. Cement, steel, concrete, plasterboard, brick, insulation, these products are now front and centre in the decarbonisation conversation.

At the same time, we're moving away from the old 'take, make, dispose' model. Circularity, reuse and waste reduction are becoming core priorities, not aspirations. And sustainability has shifted from a compliance question to a business strategy question. Investors, customers and our own people expect credible, transparent progress, not just commitments.

For an architect or specifier reading this, what does that shift actually mean when they sit down to design a building?
It means the product choices on the drawing today have a much bigger sustainability footprint than they used to be credited with. When a designer chooses a wall system, an insulation product or a cladding, they're not just specifying performance, they're specifying carbon, water, waste and end-of-life impact for the next 50 years.

The good news is that the data to make those decisions well is more available than ever. Environmental Product Declarations, lifecycle assessments, recycled-content disclosures, the transparency has improved enormously. Saint-Gobain has committed to 100 per cent of our manufactured products being covered by LCAs and EPDs by 2030, and we're well on the path. Our job as a manufacturer is to make that data clear, comparable and useful, not another spreadsheet for a designer to wade through.

What is the most common pain point you hear from architects and specifiers on sustainability right now?
The honest answer is decision fatigue. There are a lot of labels, claims and frameworks in the market, and it can be hard to know which numbers to trust and how to compare them. We hear designers ask: 'Is recycled content the right metric? Or embodied carbon? Or circularity? Or all of them, and how do I weight them?'

The other pain point is the assumption that doing the right thing comes with a cost premium or a performance trade-off. In a lot of cases, that gap has closed. A lightweight Hebel wall system, for instance, can deliver lower embodied carbon, faster build times, better thermal performance and improved resilience in bushfire-prone areas, without compromise. Our role is to keep proving, project by project, that low-carbon and high-performing are not opposites.

CSR talks about being a manufacturer leading the shift to sustainable manufacturing. What does that look like in practice?
It means changing what happens inside our plants, not just what we say about our products. Our climate change pillar commits us to optimising our manufacturing operations, improving energy and process efficiencies, electrifying where we can, switching to renewable electricity, and exploring emerging decarbonisation technologies through partnerships. The Saint-Gobain group target is an 80 per cent renewable electricity share by 2030 and a 33 per cent absolute reduction in scope 1 and 2 emissions over the same period.

On circularity, it means redesigning packaging, minimising plastic, building take-back and offcut programs with our customers, and choosing recycled and regenerative inputs wherever the chemistry and the performance allow. And it means being honest about where we are on each pathway, what's solved, what's underway and what still needs collaboration to crack.

What role does collaboration play in getting the industry to where it needs to be?
Collaboration is everything. No single manufacturer, designer, builder or government can decarbonise the built environment alone. We need transparent data, shared standards, common definitions of circularity, and supply chains that can scale low-carbon products to the volumes Australian construction actually needs.

The Green Building Council of Australia is a good example of what consistent, industry-wide engagement can deliver. Green Star has evolved from a design and construction rating tool into a whole-of-life framework that drives embodied carbon, resilience, circularity and wellbeing outcomes. Our sponsorship of the 2026 Sustainability Summit and Awards is part of the same instinct, backing the forums where the industry comes together to set the bar higher.

What do you see as the next big opportunity, or challenge, for the sector?
The next big challenge and the next big opportunity are the same thing: moving from carbon reduction to true circularity, while designing for climate resilience at the same time. We've made strong progress on operational energy efficiency. The harder work now is tackling embodied carbon, designing for disassembly, building genuine reuse markets, and making sure the buildings we put up today can still perform in 30 or 50 years' time as the climate changes around them.

That's a major opportunity for innovation in low-carbon materials, modular and lightweight construction, digital tracking of materials across the lifecycle, and new business models that extend asset life. The industry leaders will be the ones who can integrate decarbonisation, circularity and resilience into a single, coherent strategy, not three separate workstreams.

If there's one thing you'd like architects, designers and specifiers to take away from this conversation, what is it?
That you don't need to wait for a future product to design a lower-carbon, more circular building. The materials, the data and the partnerships exist today. As manufacturers, our job is to keep raising the bar on what's possible and to make low-carbon, circular specification the easiest choice, not the hardest. As designers, your specifications shape what gets built and what gets demanded next. The faster we can make sustainable choices the default rather than the exception, the faster the whole sector moves.

That's why CSR is so proud to sponsor the 2026 Sustainability Summit and Awards. The work being recognised in this program is exactly the work that makes sustainable buildings the norm, and that is the future we are building solutions for.

Building solutions for a better future: A conversation with Paul Dalton, CEO, CSR

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