In construction, calculating building materials, site development and labor are standard costs considered for every project. But in the last few years, a new cost layer has been included with more frequency: embodied carbon emissions and impacts.
In Europe and parts of North America corporate and public sector building owners are seeking to manage embodied carbon—the carbon footprint of a building or infrastructure project before it becomes operational—to meet net-zero carbon targets. And they’ve begun using new automated and life cycle assessment tools from Trimble and One Click LCA to help shape and inform their structural design and development.
Integrating Trimble’s Tekla tools with One Click LCA’s database of construction materials’ carbon levels gives structural engineers an automated embodied carbon and life cycle assessment solution for all stages of a project. Together, designers can combine carbon data with structural design to instantly understand the embodied carbon impacts of their structural and materials choices for new and existing structures.
"I’ve been waiting for a solution like this for as long as I've been in the industry," said Kari Nöjd, Sustainability Technology Manager at engineering firm Sweco Rakennetekniikka Oy, Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancy based in Stockholm. “Instead of focusing only on cost and schedule, more building owners are asking which alternative has the lowest embodied carbon, and that is something structural designers need to be able to answer.”
Historically, Sweco’s process for calculating environmental impacts was manually calculating carbon quantity estimations of building elements from drawings or building information models (BIMs), and then transferring the data into the One Click software. It was not only a time consuming exercise, it was vulnerable to calculation errors when design changes were made.
An ambitious project to build a new $30-million carbon neutral sports center in Imatra, Finland, however, presented an opportunity to pilot a new connected, concept and design workflow using Tekla and One Click LCA.
