It is my opinion as an architect that the design team should be doing LCA calculations internally. The software is fairly easy to use now, and if we don’t do it ourselves, we don’t get smarter about the potential for reductions that we work on every day. I have seen many instances where design teams outsource to consultants (I’m talking more broadly than embodied carbon calculations now), and get a single report at the end that doesn’t influence design. This happens all the time with energy modeling, it’s a check box in enough cases to be concerning. As architects we control or oversee nearly ALL of the specifications for products, ie all of the embodied carbon. If we don’t calculate it in house we are not training employees in the basic terminology and practices of embodied carbon reduction.
Even though I have been a passionate advocate for energy modeling for years (I wrote a book on it), embodied carbon is even more integral to the practice of architecture and design than energy use, since we control the specs. We can reasonably outsource energy modeling (it’s really complicated and involves systems we don’t know much about), but we should not outsource embodied carbon if we can help it.
Owners are sometimes unwilling to pay for early energy modeling on projects, as a related scope; if we don’t know what we’re doing without consultants, we are just going to fail on embodied carbon on those project where the owner is unwilling to pay for an embodied carbon consultant.
I can see a few instances where a third party should assist (if you are just getting started, perhaps), but if we don’t own it as design teams, we are not going to take the urgent action on it that we need to.
CLF has great resources to get started, and you can always join the CLF-Seattle Tool User Group to ask questions…
-Kjell