How Data Will Decarbonize the Construction Industry
The EC3 makes embodied carbon as easy to assess as material cost
As a sustainability specialist at Skanska, Stacy Smedley was tasked with computing the carbon impact of various building materials. This required her to consult PDFs of environmental product declarations (EPDs) created by the materials manufacturers, manually enter the carbon data into a spreadsheet, and then add it up. It was a slow and laborious process. Smedley wondered what would happen if they could digitize this information and make it easily available to designers, engineers, owners, and other stakeholders. And so the idea for the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) was born. With embodied carbon in the built world responsible for 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions every year, it’s an important tool for reducing climate impact. Today, the EC3 has over 25,000 registered users in 70 countries, and it has digitized more than 100,000 EPDs. For a pilot project by Microsoft and Skanska in the Seattle area, the EC3 helped reduce carbon impact by 18%. If that change could be scaled to construction across the globe, that would be equivalent to a reduction of 1 billion metric tons of carbon each year. Ultimately, Smedley points out, the only way that we can make informed decisions about embodied carbon is when carbon impact is as easy to see as material cost, and the EC3 is an important step in that direction.
About the speaker
Stacy Smedley is the executive director at Building Transparency, where she leads the continued management and development of the free, open-access Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool and works to educate and engage the building industry on possibilities for reducing embodied carbon emissions. She holds degrees from the University of Washington.
Related learning
Learn more about the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator with these sessions:
Streamline process of De-Carbonization w/ Revit, BIM 360, LCA/EC3 & PowerBI
Thesla Collier shows you how to audit embodied carbon through the entire building lifecycle, streamline the process, and scale it across all projects underway at your company.
Climate-efficient infrastructure with EC3 and AutoCAD Civil 3D®
Turn your carbon auditing skills to infrastructure projects. Phil Northcott and Tim Burnham show you how they integrated Civil3D with EC3 on design and construction of an underground water network.
Preview the new free “Tally Climate Action Tool” (tallyCAT)
TallyCAT helps Revit users get accurate material takeoffs, highlights and provides data about climate impacts. Learn how to track and reduce carbon with live feedback throughout the delivery process.