Embodied Carbon Assessment
Embodied carbon is an important metric for several reasons:
- Environmental Impact: Embodied carbon can account for as much as half of a building’s lifetime environmental impact. It’s a significant percentage of global emissions and requires urgent action to address it.
- Global Warming Potential (GWP): The impact of embodied carbon is typically expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent units (CO2e), which represents the future global warming potential (GWP) of the emissions over their lifetime.
- Increasing Proportion of Emissions: As the operational footprint of buildings decreases due to improved heating and cooling technology and other factors, embodied carbon is expected to account for nearly half of the overall carbon footprint of new construction between now and 2050.
- Role in Meeting Climate Targets: With the building sector responsible for about 30% of all global carbon emissions, addressing embodied carbon is a priority.
Testing for embodied carbon involves a method called life cycle assessment (LCA) to track the emissions produced over the full life cycle of a product or process. These emissions are converted into metrics that reflect their potential effects on the environment; however, because of the current lack of visibility into where materials are sourced, manufactured, and how they are shipped, embodied carbon is more difficult to measure and track than operational carbon. It is often only shared as a result of manufacturers self-reporting data. Digging into the embodied carbon metrics helps to ensure that materials are used optimally and that the manufacturing, transportation, and construction processes are energy efficient. Reducing embodied carbon not only cuts costs but also marks carbon savings. So, do you want to have one of the most environmentally responsible projects around?