CLF Community and particularly the GC brain trust,
I’m wondering if there’s a good LCA tool out there for estimating lifetime emissions of construction equipment or at least the information needed to estimate these emissions. There’s a tool existing out of the UK and some research studying the primary sources of lifetime emissions from construction equipment (biggest contributor is fuel usage, not surprisingly) (linked below).
The UK tool (I assume location wouldn’t significantly impact results?) requires estimates of usage (work days for duration of project * hrs/day), fuel consumption (l/hr) and energy use for electric alternatives (recognizing both of these may vary with location, climate, and work), anticipated lifetime, oil usage, %-biofuel, and end of life recycle rate.
Would be great to have easier access to this kind of information. Does anyone know of ongoing efforts to this end?
On one project we’re tracking the fuel usage and engine tier for on site equipment. To my knowledge, there isn’t a full LCA for equipment, however, I can reach out to some earthwork contractors and rental companies to see if they track in house.
Fuel usage is the biggest contributor (still need estimated consumption rates). I think this would be an alright starting point–similar to how we often just use A1-A3 emissions for embodied carbon calcs–but this tool also estimated embodied carbon of the equipment.
I’m hoping having the full picture would give us better ground to answer questions about payback period of electric alternatives and understand other influences like grid factor or electric vehicle embodied carbon, for example.
Would you attribute a proportion of a piece of construction equipment’s whole-life carbon total (A-C), or just the fuel it consumes (B6) to your construction project’s A4 emissions? – assuming the equipment is used for the construction process.
The ERA equipment calculator above proportions the lifetime emissions based on how much you’re expecting to use it (i.e. if construction is 2yrs and the lifespan is 10yrs, 20% of embodied emissions attributed). This approach makes sense to me as part of the project’s A5 emissions! The tool also includes A4 emissions for transporting the equipment to site.
