No one needs an explanation of why cost matters in construction—it's a fundamental factor that determines what you can build and how. Every material, product, and service in the industry comes with a clear price so that builders can create budgets. Prices may change and overruns may occur, but at any given moment, the cost of a project or any part of it can be calculated and decisions can be made based on that. You could call that “fiscal impact.”
With carbon impact, it’s been a different story. Until the past few decades, it wasn’t even a factor people thought to consider or keep track of. The Kyoto Protocol was only ratified by the UN Climate Change Council in 1997, officially recognizing two things: that climate change was happening, and that it was caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity.
Once we understood the negative effects of carbon released into the atmosphere, the question became: how do we reduce it? Measuring the carbon impact from operations of heating, cooling, and powering buildings—referred to in the industry as “Scope 1 emissions”—was relatively easy: just look at your power and fuel bills, for starters. And because of this, the industry made significant progress in creating more energy-efficient buildings and sourcing power from green technologies.
But what about the “Scope 3 emissions,” the embodied carbon emitted in the sourcing, fabrication, transportation, installation, and disposal of the materials or products that go into a building? That data was complex. Calculating it was a slow and manual process at first.
Today, leaders in industry are working to change that—to make carbon impact as clear, simple, and calculable as monetary cost. A number of experts led sessions at AU 2022 on this topic., sharing a common idea that, if we make it easy to do the math in advance, designers and owners can make decisions about carbon impact before we start to build—when it’s easiest and cheapest to consider alternatives.
Building on a foundation of sustainability
Stacy Smedley started her career as a residential architect, eventually earning her LEED certification. At global architecture and engineering firm Skanska, she became a sustainability analyst focused on performing the project lifecycle assessments (PLAs) that would help the company meet their decarbonization targets.
The goals were lofty, but the process was tedious. In her AU 2022 Theater talk, Smedley recounts the experience: “I would download all of the environmental product declarations, put them into multiple folders, pull out those carbon intensity values, put them into Excel spreadsheets, and do it over and over again. It would take me hours and hours.”
“I started to wonder if we could look at the carbon intensity of products just like cost,” Smedley goes on. “If we had a carbon intensity per unit of material right next to the cost per unit of material, could we start to actually incentivize manufacturers and owners to prioritize low-carbon materials just like we look for low-cost materials? I hypothesized if we did that, that we would start to decarbonize the built environment when it came to the manufacturing of these materials.”
With the support of Skanska, Smedley developed the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), a free tool for anyone to access a digitized database of environmental product declarations and assess their own designs. With over 100,000 EPDs in the database and over 25,000 registered users in 70 countries, the EC3, now under the auspices of Building Transparency, is making carbon impact estimates simpler than ever before. In partnership with Autodesk, Building Transparency is integrating the tool into Revit, BIM 360, and other Autodesk tools so that you can evaluate the impact of your building as you design it.
Product design informed by impact
Neil D’Souza took a similar journey, but with a focus on product design and manufacturing. After attaining a master’s in environmental sciences, he became a software engineer, eventually rising to be CTO at Thinkstep, a leader in corporate sustainability solutions. Today, he’s CEO of Makersite, a company that uses AI to automate product lifecycle assessments for manufacturing.
Along the way, he, like Smedley, spent years performing LCAs manually. “Whole lifecycle impact assessments are just slow,” D’Souza says in his AU 2022 Theater talk. “When I started my career in the field doing these kind of assessments, the average was six months to do any assessment.”
By automating the process, they can scale it radically. “Last year [in 2021], we did 8 million such assessments,” he says. “This year [in 2022], we've already completed 20 million. That's the change.”
“We need to make carbon just another number,” D’Souza says. “It needs to be simple enough and accessible enough, just like you look for prices, you look for the weight of the material, you look for the density of the material,” D’Souza says. “If you make it simple enough for the 30 million-odd engineers in this world, I think we will have solved the problem of decarbonization.”
The Makersite toolset is being integrated into Autodesk tools like Fusion 360, enabling designers and stakeholders to understand the impact of every decision they make.
Running the numbers
“It's only been in the past handful of years that the emissions of how we manufacture the things that we put into products or into our building materials has really come to the surface as the biggest scope of emissions for most companies,” Smedley says. “There are emissions at every step of that process, and they're emissions that we can now understand and take action on. Who is the lowest carbon option in my market? What is their lowest carbon product? And how can I use that data to make change?”
“Everything to an engineer with a hammer is a nail,” D’Souza says. “All you need to do is make sure they have the right hammer. That's what I mean by making carbon just another number.”
Build your skills with carbon assessment, lifecycle analysis, and optimization for sustainability with these AU 2022 classes:
- Neil D’Souza shows you how to use the new Makersite plugin in Fusion 360 to do a lifecycle analysis on a product design, explore alternative materials, and optimize for impact.
- Thesla Collier demonstrates how to audit embodied carbon through the entire building lifecycle and scale it across all projects underway at your company using Revit, the EC3, and Microsoft PowerBI.
- Terry Swack walks you through the Tally Climate Action Tool (TallyCAT), a Revit plugin that enables real-time data connection between a Revit model and the EC3.
- Phil Northcott and Tim Burnham take LCA into the world of infrastructure and show you how to use the EC3 to audit and improve an underground water network.