Embodied Carbon: What is YOUR company doing?

Good afternoon, CLF participants! I am curious…what is YOUR company doing on the front of Embodied Carbon calculations? Have they shown any interest yet?

If you are making progress, are you doing LCA’s?

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Brian, I have been calculating the total reduction in carbon for each Concrete Floor we place using our PrimX system for a few years now. Typically the system averages a 40 percent reduction in Carbon per building when compared to a typical grade 60 / jointed floor. We are passionate about Carbon Reduction through design and advancements in materials. What is the best resource to learn more about LCA’s?

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Brian,

Our firm has been involved in developing LCA’s on our structural systems for the last year, and are producing them at about 1 per week as time allows. We have 6 engineers trained in Tally. We are working with our own database until SE2050 publishes theirs.

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Hi Brian -

Our firm launched the Emission Zero initiative this year, which commits all of our project teams to addressing both operational and embodied carbon through design, education and advocacy. On the embodied carbon front, we are using Tally to run whole building LCA studies on every project that we design (action 1.3 in the initiative document). We are currently implementing a workflow that integrates Tally modeling with BIM modeling tasks for our design teams, with the goal of being able to evaluate embodied carbon impacts at every phase of the design from schematic to construction documents. About ~15 people at the firm are now familiar with using Tally, and we have a “core” team of three folks who review results, and work with project teams to determine next steps (such as looking at material alternatives, or comparing systems). To date, our database has approximately 40 projects that have been evaluated through Tally. Hope this helps!

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Very excited to see the surge in actions to reduce embodied carbon–particularly amongst structural engineers and the SE 2050 Commitment!

Our firm has developed an internal community of practice around embodied carbon with working groups tackling everything from specifications to assessing EC tools. The group has grown over the past year to well over 100 people in the last year.

Our R+D group has also developed Beacon, a FREE AND OPEN SOURCE Revit plug-in tool, In an effort to make it easy for structural engineers to take-off material quantities from a Revit model to calculate embodied carbon. https://core-studio.gitbook.io/beacon/

Particularly proud to work with folks like Duncan Cox (aka @dcox), contributor to cross-firm, cross-industry collaborations with LETI and IStructE. Some useful resources linked below:
LETI Climate Emergency Design Guide
IStructE: Setting Carbon Strategies Using the SCORS Rating System

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Salvo is the UK partner in a major three year European Union research study - FCRBE - with others in Belgium and France aimed at encouraging greater reuse which will hopefully publish a peer-reviewed methodology for calculating the carbon benefit of reuse of materials and products reclaimed from demolition and refurbishment. Publication is due towards the end of next year, and interested parties can subscribe to our monthly newsletter at www.salvoweb.com

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That is fantastic, Luke!

Taylor, I would start with the paper by Francis Yang entitled “Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment.” SE2050.org also has resources for you to learn more about WBLCA’s.

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from think tank engineering in Spain, we have developed a methodology to asses material overuse, through comparison to theoretical optima.
it demonstrates how current buildings use average 25 times more structural capacity than the minimum required, hence over 90% savings are possible.
more info in our published paper:

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