You can’t manage what you can’t measure
It’s all about transparency and accountability
Introducing the Embodied Carbon Construction Calculator (EC3)
Each year, the built environment contributes almost 40% of CO2 emissions worldwide. Overall, most of this is due to energy required to operate extant buildings, including lighting, equipment, heating and cooling. However, between now and 2060 the world’s population will be doubling the amount of building floorspace, equivalent to building an entirely new New York City every 35 days for 40 years. Most of the carbon footprint of these new buildings will take the form of embodied carbon — the emissions associated with building construction, including extracting, transporting, and manufacturing materials.
Although architects, engineers, and developers have made impressive strides to heighten energy efficiency in new buildings over the past 25 years, the industry has paid virtually no attention to embodied carbon emissions. No industry standards. No building certification programs. No public policies or building codes. And no widely used, transparent, publicly available method or tool for measuring embodied carbon.
However, in 2018 many significant organizations in the industry signed the Carbon Smart Building Declaration, including the US and World Green Building Councils, the World Resources Institute, the United Nations Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction, and the American Institute of Architects, committing themselves to work for the elimination of embodied carbon emissions by 2050. The Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) together with Architecture 2030 published the Carbon Smart Materials Palette. Finally, Carbon Leadership Forum, in partnership with Skanska and C-Change Labs, announced the development of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) — a comprehensive and thoughtfully designed tool to budget, specify, and reduce embodied carbon in construction, enabling Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) use to move to a next generation of significance within the United States.
The EC3 project will provide open-source embodied carbon data through EPDs, with variations and statistical uncertainties noted. It will integrate this data into current cost and project material quantity estimating processes that already exist within the industry, enabling design and construction teams to more readily integrate embodied carbon into design and procurement decisions. EC3 will be free to use, and the EC3 database can hold and index hundreds of thousands of EPDs covering every major building material producer and product in North America, searchable by product performance specs, manufacturing location, and verification status. The team has digitized over 7,000 construction sector EPDS to date and adds more as funding becomes available.
EC3 applications
EC3 will be able to be integrated into a variety of existing programs, tools, and green building standards, including the American Institute of Architects Materials Pledge, the US Green Building Council’s LEED standard, the Structural Engineers 2050 initiative, and the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge and Zero Carbon Certification. While measuring and providing accountability for embodied carbon, EC3 will also accelerate the development and adoption of new materials that can permanently store large quantities of carbon in buildings.
The EC3 team is committed to open application programming interfaces (APIs) and deep integration with the existing ecosystem of tools. EC3 currently exchanges material quantity and global warming potential (GWP) data with a major building information modeling (BIM) system and with Microsoft Excel; further integrations with other CAD tools, EPD program operators, and at least one enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite are in the planning stage.
EC3 Rollout in the Pacific NW
EC3 will be piloted on the new Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, which will include 16 new buildings and 6.7 million square feet of renovated workspace. CLF, along with its project partners on the Microsoft design and construction team, will use the scope, visibility and buying-power of this project to advance industry practices and develop new product choices for lower carbon materials. In addition, in Spring 2019, Washington State’s governor and legislature are advancing the study of “Buy Clean” legislation, which would require all publicly-funded construction to measure and reduce embodied carbon with the help of a tool such as EC3. The CLF has invited all suppliers of construction materials in the Pacific NW to help populate the EC3 database.
From Puget Sound to the World: Scaling up EC3
By November 2019, EC3 will be ready for a North American launch, supported by multiple major building industry organizations and many sizable and influential companies such as Autodesk and Microsoft. In 2020, CLF looks to partner with the UN’s Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction and the World Green Building Council as well as global industry partners to launch EC3 for the global building industry. From its inception, EC3 has been architected to allow for easy localization in different languages and countries, and its cloud-based, crowd-sourced database will scale rapidly to include EPDs from multiple countries.
EC3 Governance, Development and Advisory Board
The Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) at the University of Washington is responsible for the creation and oversight of EC3. C-Change Labs implements, tests, and supports the software and database. Skanska drives EC3’s user interface and industry adoption. Carbon Innovations helps scale industry engagement through communications, outreach, education and a collective impact initiative. The Advisory Board currently includes representatives from Skanska, Microsoft, US Green Building Council, MKA Structural Engineers, International Living Futures Institute, Interface Carpet, Structural Engineering Institute (ASCE) and American Institute of Architects.
