Civil engineers play an important role in reducing the embedded carbon footprint of the construction industry. Trimble Business Development Manager Sakari Lahti explains how small decisions on the desk can have a huge impact on our planet
One of my interests as a structural engineer is to help other engineers design buildings that are more sustainable. My work is particularly focused on concrete, as this is where our industry has excellent opportunities to make carbon reductions in design, materials engineering and during the construction phase. I joined Tekla in 2013 as an application manager focused on growing our global precast business. As sustainability became a more pressing issue, I soon saw that optimizing a building to minimize its embedded carbon is done with similar mechanisms to those used to calculate material costs. I therefore had the idea to make embodied carbon a design parameter in our software, so we validated the need and continued with the development.
