Tackling Embodied Carbon in Infrastructure: Technological Solutions for a Sustainable Future

SPENCER JARRETT: Hello, everyone. Thank you for attending this industry talk about tackling embodied carbon and infrastructure. I'm your host. My name is Spencer Jarrett, and I'll look after the US market at One Click LCA as an LCA consultant and business development engineer.

One Click LCA, for those of you that aren't aware of us, we're a global technology and consulting company, and we provide end-to-end sustainability software and consulting solutions. But we are focused solely on the embodied carbon impacts of construction and manufacturing and reducing those impacts. So thank you again for joining, and let's go ahead and review the agenda for this session.

So we'll start with the big why behind embodied carbon calculation. Take a look at the big picture of the global climate crisis and the role that infrastructure plays in that. And then we'll focus a little bit more on embodied carbon and infrastructure itself and dig a little bit deeper into the data that is out there and that we need to actually do embodied carbon calculations. And lastly, I'll provide a brief demonstration of how to use One Click LCA and use the Civil 3D integration to automate the LCA process for a roadway project.

So as I mentioned, we're going to start high level at first and just provide a little bit of context to help us get into the mindset of why we would do an embodied carbon calculation for an infrastructure project. So let's start with what is the climate crisis.

So some of you might have heard of the Anthropocene or the Great Acceleration. Anthropocene describes the geological period where humans have become an influential force in the conditions of Earth's biosphere. So the Great Acceleration started around 1950, and it's characterized by the exponential increase of many important socioeconomic and environmental damage variables.

Some of the key socioeconomic variables that have experienced significant acceleration since the '50s include population growth. So the population has more than doubled since the 1950s from 2.5 billion to 7.9 billion in 2021, economic growth with the global GDP growing at an unprecedented rate, urbanization with the proportion of people living in urban areas increasing dramatically from 30% in 1950 to 56% in 2021.

Energy consumption-- with the global energy consumption rising rapidly from 6 billion tons of oil equivalent in 1952, over 14 billion tons in 2021, resource consumption, which should be obvious based on the other variables that we've already hit on. And the last two-- CO2 emissions and biodiversity loss.

So with the acceleration of urbanization of industrialization globally, we've caused a lot of damage to the Earth's biosphere. So that's the big picture for why we should care about embodied carbon and infrastructure.

So just to drive this point home a little bit more. Here we're looking at a climate stripe infographic, and each stripe represents the average global temperature for a single year relative to the average temperature over the period as a whole. So the blue indicates cooler than average years, while the red years show years that were hotter than the average. So if we look at this carefully, we can see that the global temperature increase of roughly 1.3 degrees has taken place since pre-industrial levels. So you can see we went from -0.6 up to an excess of 0.6 in current times.

The geophysical and societal impacts of climate change caused by the increased temperatures are complex and interconnected. On one side, we observe the important geophysical impacts of climate change, like rising temperatures, heat waves, rainfall disturbances, increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, sea level rise, coastline retreat, increase in ocean acidity, and biodiversity collapse. And here on the other side, we have the impacts. On the other hand, we have the geophysical impacts leading to societal impacts that are a lot more relatable and impact us directly on a daily basis, things like water shortages, climate disasters, decline in fishing and agricultural yields, climate migrations, and finally, political and financial instabilities.

So all of these things are interconnected, and they all have a very complex relationship where it's hard to determine the effect that one might have on any of the others.

So to summarize, climate change is already causing a real drastic impact today, and it impacts everyone in the world, for some more than others. And it's driven by human activities. So we need to act as soon as possible to reduce the impact to help the environment and in turn help human society.

So just to provide some context as to the path that we're on and the path that we need to be on, we have this graph from the UN Environmental Program. So this is showing the annual carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually in gigatons and the different scenarios that we are considering. So the one in blue there at the top is basically showing us the path that we're on with current commitments, current actions, current policies that governments and organizations are taking globally. And the bar in green there at the bottom is the path that we need to be on.

So in short, we need to make some very drastic changes very quickly in order to slow the temperature rise in Earth's biosphere. So now let's talk more specifically about infrastructure's role in all of this.

So in this graphic, this is showing us the emissions from each aspect of infrastructure. And at the bottom, we have all of those different fields combined. So energy and buildings themselves make up the most of the impact and transportation as they're coming in third. What we're going to focus on are buildings themselves or the materials themselves.

As the electrical grids continue to decarbonize and as equipment and technology becomes more energy efficient, the energy portion, that 37% there at the top, is going to begin to decrease as it already has been. It's going to continue to decrease while buildings, infrastructure projects and the materials that make up those projects are going to become the biggest culprit.

So why should we as design and construction professionals care? Well, we're actually a big part of the problem. The reason the construction sector is a big part of the problem is because the building stock and infrastructure projects is increasing heavily. So what we're seeing here are projections over the next 40 years of the building stock in floor area that's expected to increase. So Africa and India are expected to grow the fastest, and North America is expected to grow by 9:00 point 8,000,000,000m over the next 40 years.

So this is the equivalent of building a New York City every month for the next 40 years. So there's a lot of opportunity to minimize the impact of the projects that are being built in the future.

So because of this building, stock expected to double in size over the next 40 years, it's going to create about 230 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in the form of embodied carbon. So in the form of the impact of just having those materials be installed into the project are going to account for about 230 gigatons.

So here we can see the average impact, we'll say, of some of the most common materials on infrastructure projects. So carbon emissions resulting from the life cycle of a material is called embodied carbon. So this part of carbon emissions could accelerate climate change by six years. Besides climate change, though, resource depletion is accelerated by using too many materials and having to mine more and more raw materials over the next 40 years and the construction itself.

The industry globally accounts for about 50% of all raw materials that are extracted on an annual basis. So now we'll get into some of the details about how to do an embodied carbon calculation for an infrastructure project, how the results are expressed, and how we can compare those results.

So here we have an infographic from us at One Click that's basically explaining to you all the sources of embodied carbon. We're looking at every single lifecycle period that makes up the entire life cycle of a specific material. So we'll start here on the left with A 1.

So A1 is the extraction of or harvesting of the raw material that will be used in the final building product. A2 is the transportation of that raw material to the manufacturing site. And A3 is actually manufacturing that material, using those different raw materials and having it become its final building product, whether it be concrete, steel, CMU block, whatever it is. That final product is what's left at A3, and we refer to A1 through A3 as cradle to gate.

And then after that, we get into A4, which is actually taking that finished product to the construction site. A5, the assembly or installation of those products. And then all of the B phases, B1 through B5, account for the operational impacts of that specific material.

So does it need to be repaired throughout its lifetime? Does it need to be replaced? Does it need to be refurbished? Things like that.

And then C1 through C4, is providing the life cycle periods for the end of life of that material. So C1 being deconstruction or demo of the material. C2 transporting it to the site where it will be processed. C3 actually processing that waste and then C4 is disposal.

So as you can imagine, the whole life cycle assessment of an infrastructure project requires a lot of data. Basically, it's giving you the big picture and allowing you to assess all of the environmental impacts of your building from cradle to cradle-- so the entire life cycle period.

It also helps you have that big picture because LC methodology avoids suboptimization and ensures a scientific basis for actually doing these calculations and coming up with the assessment. So basically, we use a methodology that characterizes the different environmental impacts into different characterization factors.

So there's different greenhouse gases. And essentially, we are going to use the characterization factors as our method for determining these greenhouse gases into CO2 equivalents, so carbon dioxide equivalents. That's why right there you can see it says kilograms of carbon dioxide. E the E is for equivalent. Basically, the characterization factors allow us to convert all of the greenhouse gas impacts into one unit, being CO2 E, So? We can more easily represent the environmental impact and more easily compare different scenarios, different building materials, and different impacts overall.

So these are all the relevant ISO and EN standards for LCA processes. In short, they provide the framework for some of the voluntary and regulatory certification schemes, such as Envision. And here we're looking at a couple of the different certification schemes that are out there. Breem CEEQUAL and Envision. And you can see that each one has different requirement for the lifecycle periods that need to be accounted for in that LCA.

So we've talked about the big picture, the climate crisis. We've talked about infrastructure and how it fits into actually being a cause of accelerating that crisis and how we have a lot of opportunity to minimize the impact of the next 40 years. Now, let's talk about specifically the data that we use to calculate embodied carbon and how we use that data to actually come up with the final environmental impact of a project.

So it's a lot simpler than it seems. In short, we need to know the quantity of all of the materials on that project-- so all of the Rebar, all of the concrete, all of the steel, all of the amended soils, all of the base, all the subbase, all the asphalt, all of those materials, their quantities. And then we're going to multiply their quantities by the impact in kilograms of CO2 for that material, and that'll give us the total environmental impact.

So with One Click LCA, you have a couple of different options to actually gather those quantities. The easiest way to do this is to use a bill of materials or a material takeoff from your project's cost plan, maybe from the contractor. Or maybe you've already done your material takeoff, and you can import an Excel file with the materials and their quantities into One Click LCA.

And it will match your materials to the most appropriate. Impact data point in kilograms of CO2. Other popular ways to do this are to use a BIM integration.

So One Click LCA integrates with pretty much every BIM tool that's out there. We'll take a look at Autodesk Civil 3D today. But we integrate with the Autodesk Construction Cloud, with Procore, with Revit, with Tekla ArchiCAD, and I could go on, but pretty much all of them.

And the other important thing to know is if you have this material information in multiple places, so maybe your Revit model or your Civil 3D model doesn't include all of the materials that make up the project. Maybe the rest of them are in an Excel file. You can combine those two data sources into one life cycle assessment on One Click LCA.

So the material impact data point or resource that you're going to use in your LCA can come from a couple of different places. But we'll talk about the best options to the least preferred options. So the best option is to have an EPD.

An EPD is an Environmental Product Declaration. This comes from the manufacturer and is third-party verified and says, hey, this is the impact of one block of my product directly from the manufacturer, could even be as specific to have that information from one of the manufacturer's individual plants.

The next option is to use generic material profiles. So there are lots of generic material databases out there that you can utilize. One Click LCA has its own database as well, where we've gone ahead and created generic material profiles for a lot of infrastructure assemblies and construction types and materials that don't have EPDs. So you can pull from that in the event that there is no EPD.

And lastly is just other data sources that maybe aren't official databases. Maybe you pulled them from a research study or somewhere else. You can input that metric for that specific material into One Click LCA, so you still have something to go off of and your calculation. But it's best to use an EPD in One Click LCA.

We have about 250,000 material data sets overall. So there's a lot for you to choose from. Odds are, we have the data point in there that you would need. We're a global company on pretty much every continent, except for Antarctica, of course. About 200 people in the company and we've been around since 2001, solely focused on embodied carbon in the construction industry.

So this just highlights some of the tools that we have for each phase of design and construction. So we do have conceptual carbon modeling tool that allows you to take a look at the potential environmental impact of a project before you ever even draw or model anything. And then from there, we have integrations with parametric tools and then getting into BIM tools, which is typically where this ends up taking place, either using a Revit model, a Civil 3D model, or just an Excel file. What you would do is take that information, put it into One Click LCA, and then you can compare material options using the database of 250,000 EPDs and other material data points.

You can compare manufacturers. You can compare materials just in general or entire design options to see what's going to have less of an impact. And you can also input cost data, so you can weigh the cost alongside the environmental impact and consider those hand in hand at the same time.

And this is just actually a screenshot from the software. Here we're comparing a couple of different tile products from different states here in the US. On the top right, we can actually see that kilogram CO2 per square meter metric. So obviously, the one on the right is a lot less impactful.

And we can look at material classifications as a whole. So here we're looking at glass wool insulation, and we can look at pretty much every EPD, every manufacturer EPD that's in the database, and every generic material profile. So you can see for the material that you've chosen, how does it stack up against the other options that are out there? Are you choosing one of the better materials that you have the ability to source for the project? Are you choosing one of the worst ones? It's giving you a gut check and showing you some better options for you to choose from.

And here we're just seeing that same thing in a different interface, having the ability to compare products, see what's below or above your benchmark that you picked out. And we can find better products.

And here we're seeing that same thing graphically, comparing three different EPDs here, and have the ability to. See this graphically, export the data, use this data however, I like. But pretty obvious choice here. Of these three materials, the one on the left is significantly less impactful.

OK, so that wraps up the PowerPoint presentation section of this industry talk. Now we're going to get into the One Click LCA demonstration and showcase the Civil 3D integration that we have. So with that, I'm going to switch my screen. OK, so here we are.

We are in Civil 3D. And we're looking at a pretty basic, straightforward model here-- two roadways coming into this circle drive here. And below, we do have a stormwater drainage system.

So what we're going to do is take all of the material data and the quantities of the roadway material and the stormwater drainage system material and pull it into One Click LCA, the web-based application. So One Click LCA is completely web based, so you can use it from any device anywhere as long as you can connect to the internet or cell service.

So to actually use the integration in Civil 3D and in any other Autodesk software, what you would do is go to the Autodesk App Store and download the plugin for your specific tool. So I downloaded the plugin. In this case, we're Civil 3D, and once you do that, you log back into Civil 3D. It will show up here at the top. You can see One Click LCA.

And what we're going to do is really simple. This is where the One Click comes in. We're going to click LCA and cloud. So once I do that, this pop-up window appears. And let me enlarge that just a bit.

So this pop-up window appears. It's basically showing us all of the materials that we have in this model. And you'll notice I have one line here in red basically saying maybe I've somehow double counted or double input materials into this model and duplicated them. Don't want those in the calculation.

Maybe it's just giving you a heads up. And to see that, I can actually click Materials and see our base materials, so base pavement material for First Street. And I can see yeah, I've duplicated that here.

So I will just uncheck that second list. And I only want the corridor or roadway materials here and the storm drainage system in here as well. So I'm going to uncheck these at the bottom. So once we've confirmed the materials that we want to pull into our assessment-- and I'll click on the piping material here just so we can see a lot of reinforced concrete pipe.

So once we confirm our materials, all we will do is click LCA and cloud. And what this will do is pop up a window in whatever web browser that you use. And go ahead and pull that in down here.

So this will take just a couple of seconds to load. But what it's going to do is open us up inside my One Click LCA account. So you can see my name here in the top right.

So these arrows here at the top are pretty much showing you the different steps that we're going to take as we import this data. So the first thing is actually sending the material data to a specific project in One Click LCA. And I've already actually made one for this demonstration, just called it First Street Civil 3D example.

So next step is to assign it to a specific design in the specific project. I'm going to send it to our baseline design that I've already made. Here we choose the tool if we want to follow any specific certification schemes. For this example, I chose Envision because it's used quite often here in the US.

And here we have some quick filtering options. So basically, this is going to exclude or include certain material data types based on your choices here. So I just want to import everything, so I'll select that one.

And then lastly, we can choose to combine the data that we're sending to One Click LCA with data that's already in our model. We've already imported something before, or we can choose to override it. Don't have anything in there right now. So I'll just choose Replace. Ins.

Before we click continue, a couple more things to note. You can download an Excel file here. So this is basically going to provide you a bill of materials about all the materials that we're pulling in from this model as a downloadable Excel file. So you can see exactly what information we're pulling into the software. Another thing to note is if you're working with another designer, another consultant, maybe even the owner of the project, and you want to send this data to them or share it with them, we can click this button and just put in their email address, and it will show up on their One Click LCA account too.

So with that, we'll continue on. And it's just confirming I'm going to overwrite any existing data. So on this page here, we have the option to ungroup our material data points or regroup them based on different criteria. This is a pretty basic model, so there's not much need to ungroup anything or regroup them. We can talk more about this later, but you have the option to import the data in whatever way works for you. But this will suffice for this demonstration, so I'll continue on.

All right. So here we are on the last page, we can actually see all of the materials listed here that we've pulled in from that model. We can see the quantity of the materials, the share volumetrically, and lastly, resource name. This column is actually showing us the data point that we are matching to. So for the stone that makes it the base and sub base of the roadway and the asphalt, we can actually see what data point, we are using.

And we can actually see the environmental impact from here. So on this page, you have the ability to basically search that database in One Click LCA of the 250,000 available data points and find or the generic material profile that best represents your material.

And we have filters here, so you can filter by country. Even in the US here, we can filter by the state. If I hover over the US, it will show you all the states.

So what you would do is just make sure that you're matching it to the right emission profile in the form of an EPD or generic emission profile. And once you've done that, we'll continue on. So now what this is going to do is take us to our results.

So here we are on the results page for this particular project that's called First Street Civil 3D example. We selected the Envision tool at the project setup. So that's how we're seeing the results.

And first thing we can see here is the life cycle periods broken out here on the left and then the tons of carbon dioxide equivalent that originate from each life cycle period. And as a quick way to go ahead and find better materials or different manufacturers right off the bat, One Click LCA will show you what the most impactful materials are here in this ranked list. So we have the option here to go ahead and look at some alternatives. Or we can add each of these to the comparison tool, where we can then compare two different materials, different manufacturers, different plants, and so on, and see what's best. And if I scroll down a bit more here, we can see the breakdown of the global warming impacts, again by life cycle period.

But we have many different graph options here. We can see it by material, life cycle stage. We can also see the annual impacts for the lifetime of the project. For this project, I made it a 76-year lifespan.

And we can actually dig into this and these spikes at 30 years in and 60 years in are for the replacement of the asphalt. And then lastly, at the bottom, we can see all of our data sources for every data point that we used.

So this is the results page. But to actually see some of the other parameters that we have the ability to edit, I go here to input data and construction materials. This is going to take us to the full list of all the materials in the project. And this is actually where we can search for other options as well.

So we're on the construction materials query page. We have those filters here at the top where we can filter by material, by country, or by state of origin. And if I scroll down, we can see all of our materials listed, the quantities. And if I scroll to the right, we can see the other parameters that we have the ability to change within the software.

So we can actually input the specific mileage that each material traveled from its manufacturing site to the project. We can even delineate the vehicle that it was shipped on. And by clicking any of these question marks, we can get into actually seeing what the impact of each data point is.

We can edit the service life of a material if it's not going to the entire life of the project. And we can also input a specific recycled content percentage if that's known for specific material. So as an example for a quick comparison, let's actually go to the Compare Data page.

So we have no data in here yet. And let's just compare a couple of different asphalt plants. So this box here popped up, just saying I have an input, any parameters for life cycle costing. We're not going to worry about that right now.

But again, you do have the ability to weigh the cost impact of a material next to the environmental impact. So if I hit this drop down, this will actually show us all of the material groups in the database. And again, there's hundreds of thousands of options, so it does take just a minute to load.

Here we can see all those groups broken down. We start with ready mix concrete, get into asphalt paints, other materials that you might use on an infrastructure project. But again, let's compare some different asphalt options.

So we didn't use any of our filters up here at the top. So we're seeing all of their results. There's about 5,700 results here that we can use in North America.

And all these at first are generic results. But if we want to get into some plant-specific results, we can see these down here under manufacturer specific data points. And this little factory icon is indicating it is an EPD from a specific manufacturing plant. And the plants are listed here.

So let's just compare a hot mix asphalt from Auburn here to this one from Seattle as well. So we'll select the first one there. Let's find that Seattle one.

So just to make it apples to apples comparison, just compare 100 pounds of each mix. And we'll keep all other parameters equal. So we'll only be comparing the up front A1 through A3 impacts of each of these. And if we click Save, we can make the comparison here. So we're saved, and now we'll click Compare data.

So they're actually pretty close in this case in terms of the impact. The Auburn plant is slightly less impactful. So from here, we can also weigh the cost. If we did input cost data, we could compare that here on the right side.

And if we actually want to see the data points, see the EPDs that we're comparing here, we can click See Data. Again, click that resource card question mark. And we can read all about the background data of this particular EPD.

So one last thing to show you before we wrap up is just the main page for the project. So I'm going to go and click First Street Civil 3D example here, and it will take us to the main project page. So the reason I'm showing you this is because right now, we only have one LCA design in the project. It's just the data that we imported from Civil 3D. And we're seeing the impacts here on the home screen on the main page.

So once you come up with the baseline, whether it's from manually searching our database and assigning quantities to materials or importing material data from Civil 3D or Revit or an Excel file, Once you've come up with an initial baseline as to the impact of the project, you can simply copy that baseline as many times as you want.

And we'll just name this one R2 for revision two. And we can add it. So we can compare different iterations for as many designs as we want to actually show how we're reducing or increasing the impact based on selecting different material options.

So with that, I'm going to go back to our other screen and conclude the presentation here. I appreciate everyone attending. I hope you found it worthwhile. Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or just via email or phone.

Again, I'm Spencer Jarrett with One Click LCA, and I appreciate your time. Thank you.