Embodied Carbon Benchmarks Survey

Building Transparency (owner of EC3 and now Tally) is working on this. They have created a way to anonomize your projects within EC3 so that you can submit them to their emerging database. It would be great if the SD Leaders group could all start giving this data to EC3 and accelerate the building of a decent North American WBLCA dataset.

The CLF one is missing MEP and other elements, the One-Click one is pretty good for Europe ( but since it did not mention include "B1" the word "refrigerant" in the booklet, it probably did not include "refrigerant".  Also watch out for some charts are A1-A3, some are A1-A5).  You probably saw the London one?  See attached. In US, there is an effort from U of Colorado (connected to DOE) to develop a benchmarking using the DOE Prototype Building Models, but it is not out yet.  Maybe others know more? https://www.energycodes.gov/prototype-building-models

I spoke to CLF recently about this and they are hoping to update their benchmarking study with more data, particularly from architecture and engineering firms doing a lot of WBLCA analysis. The hurdle, of course, will be quality control since we all may be modeling differently, using different software, applying different material assumptions or assignments to the same product, etc. Miller Hull is happy to share our data with anybody willing to take on that effort. We have been using Tally exclusively for WBLCA, so do not have EC3 data already generated. 

By the way, we can work together on this.   Probably a good way is to lay out A1-A5, B1-B7....etc., so it is duck and duck comparisons.  A lot of these data are comparing duck to goose, sometimes donkey.

Part of Columbia's Contractor's Commitment to Sustainable Building Practices will be requesting manufacturers to provide their plan for Zero Emissions by 2050 (or sooner, of course). Since that's where embodied carbon is mostly created, I thought it relevant for this thread. We're planning to do this with a letter of some type. I think it would be extremely powerful if A/E/C etc. collectively wrote and signed on to the letter language so we could consistently voice this simple request in a unified way. We could resubmit the request to manufacturers periodically at critical times (early in design/material selection, creation of specifications, procurement, etc.). Forgive me if this is a naive question, but does such a simple letter to manufacturers already exist? And if not, should this group create it? I'm happy to switch this to a new topic disscussion if need be.

There is a CASBEE study out of Japan that we’ve built into the backend of our EPIC tool to calculate embodied carbon based on both structure type and use type. https://www.ibec.or.jp/CASBEE/english/download.htm We are hopeful that SE2050 data will be available soon to improve upon it and tie more closely to north America, though we found it meshed well with data from the CLF study. Here is our version of it from EPIC: [cid:image001.png@01D7847D.3516E3F0] Brad Jacobson FAIA, LEED® AP, DBIA Partner Pier 1 The Embarcadero, Bay 2 San Francisco, CA 94111 +1 415-214-7276 [cid:G_190118_N24_webview_bb0303a9-c805-4097-ac97-3ab99950504f.jpg] Fr

Rushyan, yes thank you for the links. I appreciate it and that is helpful. I'm reviewing and this will influence the letter to manufactuers that I'm thinking of. My concern is that materials focus / product focus is a red herring. A manufacturer could make 10% of there products absolutely fabulous. It might even be okay for those fabulous climate healing products to be a loss-leader, yet the remaining 90% products could be (likely are) contributing to the on-going climate disaster. I think that is why a broader and simpler, zero emissions 2050 plan is necessary for all companies. Thinking of specific product carbon emissions is necessary but not sufficient. How they make a zero emissions 2050 plan would of course necessitate the creation and study of EPDs, etc.