Singapore's Green Building Standards in 2026: How Expanded and Perforated Metal Contribute
[Updated: April 2026]
Buzzwords like ‘sustainability’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘green’ have dominated the construction industry in recent years. What exactly do these words mean and why should you care?
Where Singapore's Green Building Programme Stands in 2026
Singapore's built environment accounts for over a third of the country's total energy consumption. Addressing this is central to Singapore's commitments under the Paris Agreement and its Long-Term Low-Emissions Development Strategy (LEDS).
The primary policy lever is the BCA Green Mark scheme, administered by the Building and Construction Authority. Green Mark 2021 — the second edition of which came into effect in June 2024 — restructured the assessment framework significantly compared to earlier versions. It now operates on two broad categories:
Energy Efficiency is the sole prerequisite for certification. Buildings must demonstrate energy performance through one of three pathways — Prescriptive, Fixed Metrics, or Energy Savings via energy modelling — with targets stepping up from GoldPLUS (50% energy savings over the 2005 baseline) through Super Low Energy (SLE, 60% savings) to Zero Energy and Positive Energy buildings.
Sustainability covers five additional sections: Intelligence (smart buildings), Health and Wellbeing, Whole Life Carbon, Maintainability, and Resilience. These sections address embodied carbon, occupant health, long-term maintenance, and climate resilience — going well beyond operational energy into the full lifecycle of a building and its materials.
The Singapore Green Building Masterplan sets the headline target: 80-80-80 by 2030: 80% of buildings green-certified by gross floor area, 80% of new buildings achieving Super Low Energy standard, and best-in-class buildings achieving 80% energy savings against the 2005 code baseline.
For the construction industry in Singapore, going green is no longer optional for most new commercial and institutional buildings. It is a regulatory requirement.
What Green Mark 2021 Means for Material Specification
The shift from earlier Green Mark versions to GM: 2021 changes how material decisions feed into certification in two important ways.
ETTV is now a mandatory compliance metric, not merely a scored criterion. For non-residential buildings, the Envelope Thermal Transmittance Value (ETTV) — which measures the average rate of heat gain through the building facade in W/m² — must meet BCA's Code for Environmental Sustainability threshold. Every facade element, including external screens and cladding layers, contributes to the ETTV calculation. Materials that reduce solar heat gain directly support compliance.
Whole Life Carbon is now an assessed sustainability criterion. Green Mark 2021's Whole Life Carbon section evaluates embodied carbon — the carbon associated with manufacturing, transporting, installing, and eventually disposing of or recycling building materials — alongside operational energy. This means that a material's environmental credentials now need to hold up across its entire lifecycle, not just at the point of use.
Both of these changes are directly relevant to expanded metal and perforated metal specification.
As far as building materials go, expanded metals and perforated metals are one of the most sustainable.
How Expanded Metal and Perforated Metal Support Green Building Performance
ETTV Reduction Through Facade Screening
Expanded metal mesh and perforated metal panels used as external facade screens intercept direct solar radiation before it reaches the primary building envelope. The shaded zone between the screen layer and the wall surface behind experiences significantly lower peak temperatures than an unshaded solid wall — reducing the solar heat gain component of the ETTV calculation.
This is passive solar control without active systems. For architects and facade engineers working towards SLE-level energy performance, an external mesh or perforated screen layer is one of the most cost-effective ETTV reduction strategies available — it requires no mechanical components, no energy input, and no ongoing maintenance.
Performance testing indicates that expanded metals have excellent shading properties, blocking solar radiation to promote cooler interiors. This is because the 3D structure of expanded mesh breaks up the transmission of solar radiation from the exterior to interior, cooling down hot spaces with direct sunlight.
Expanded metals are an energy-saving feature - the lower perforation/% open area of the expanded metal, the better its cooling ability. Similar studies have been conducted on perforated metals that yield similar results.
Passive Ventilation and Cooling Load Reduction
The open-area structure of expanded metal mesh allows air to move through facade screens, transitional spaces, and building envelope elements without mechanical assistance. In covered walkways, semi-open lobbies, sky terraces, and atrium spaces, mesh screens provide solar shading and visual enclosure while preserving cross-ventilation, reducing the heat accumulation that would otherwise require active cooling.
Singapore's dominant energy cost in buildings is air-conditioning. Every degree of passive cooling reduces the mechanical cooling load and directly supports energy efficiency compliance. This is why the open-area structure of expanded and perforated metal is not merely an aesthetic property — it is a functional performance attribute in Singapore's climate.
Zero-Waste Manufacturing and Embodied Carbon
Expanded metal is produced by simultaneously slitting and stretching a solid metal sheet. No material is cut away or discarded — the full input sheet becomes the finished product. This zero-offcut manufacturing process means the embodied carbon of the raw material is fully utilised, with no waste fraction to account for.
Very little waste is created as expanded metal is obtained using a unique shearing and stretching process. The base raw materials are expanded by up to 10X. The transformation of raw material into finished expanded metal is also a cold process, which saves a lot of energy ordinarily required to process and manufacture building materials.
Under Green Mark 2021's Whole Life Carbon section, which assesses embodied carbon from material production through to end-of-life, this manufacturing efficiency is a genuine positive attribute. For project teams preparing Whole Life Carbon assessments, expanded metal carries a lower embodied carbon profile per unit of structural performance than fabricated assemblies that generate significant production waste.
Conclusion: Expanded metals do more with less. Less raw material, less wastage, less energy required for manufacture.
Metals have high reusability and recyclability
Steel and aluminium expanded metal and perforated metal are both 100% recyclable at end of life. At building renovation or demolition, the mesh or panel can be sent directly to a scrap metal recycler and reprocessed into new metal without special treatment.
Recycled aluminium requires only around 5% of the energy needed to produce primary aluminium — meaning that an aluminium mesh panel recovered and recycled at end of life carries a fraction of the embodied carbon of a replacement panel from virgin material. For Whole Life Carbon assessments and ESG material reporting, this circular economy potential is a quantifiable advantage.
Long Service Life and Maintainability
Green Mark 2021's Maintainability section assesses whether buildings are designed for long, manageable service lives. Materials that need to be replaced every decade carry their embodied carbon multiple times over a building's life — the replacement production, transport, and installation each add to the whole life carbon account.
Correctly specified expanded metal and perforated metal — stainless steel grades for architectural applications, hot-dip galvanised mild steel for infrastructure and industrial uses — perform reliably in Singapore's high-humidity, high-UV tropical environment for decades. The continuous-strand, no-weld construction of expanded metal eliminates joint failure modes under cyclic loading. The open-area structure prevents the water pooling and biological fouling that accelerates corrosion on solid surfaces.
A material that does not need to be replaced does not need to be re-manufactured or re-transported. The embodied carbon saving is real and accumulates over the building's service life.
Specifying Green Building Materials: What to Tell Your Metal Supplier
For project teams preparing BCA Green Mark submissions, the relevant material data Supply Bay can provide includes:
Open area percentage for ETTV calculations
Material data sheets and product specifications for submittal packages
At Supply Bay, we want to be a force for good. We’re optimistic about the potential of sustainable architecture and would like to work closely with architects and designers to realise their ideas for efficient, sustainable buildings. If you’ve got a project you’d like to collaborate on, do contact us and we can discuss the possibilities our products can offer.
