April 25, 2014—The United Kingdom’s first publicly available database for embodied carbon in buildings was recently launched in conjunction with the inaugural Embodied Carbon Week by resource efficiency experts WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme) in collaboration with the U.K. Green Building Council (UK-GBC).
As the UK-GBC explains, embodied carbon is the carbon dioxide (CO2) or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the extraction, manufacture, transportation, assembly, replacement and deconstruction of building materials and products. With the increasing importance placed on resource efficiency, the embodied carbon issue is rising up the agenda and rapidly becoming a key area of focus for property developers working on new build and redevelopment projects.
However, the embodied impacts of a project are often measured and reported in different ways, and the need for industry collaboration and agreement on how measurement is approached is becoming clear, adds the UK-GBC. Embodied Carbon Week highlighted the importance of embodied carbon in the built environment, encouraged collaboration on the different measurement processes, and set out the next steps to ensure best practice prevails across both industry and regulation in the long term.
To encourage collaboration and best practice, WRAP and the UK-GBC developed the new database, which will allow building professionals to benchmark their designs to a far greater extent and to access more detailed comparative data than was previously available to any single company or individual, and assist them in identifying where carbon reductions can be made, say the partners.
The database was designed to capture embodied carbon data for whole buildings (not individual products or materials), with the aim of creating an open, Web-based resource for building professionals to help guide and inform future designs and specifications, bringing measurable gains to the economy as well as long-term benefits to the environment.
The information in the database has been collated and presented in a clear, comprehensive and standards-compliant way to allow project teams to gain an understanding of the typical embodied carbon footprint of different building types.
Multinational built environment professional services firm Arup assisted the project by coordinating data input from across the construction industry including building owners/developers, trade bodies, other design firms, and cost and carbon consultants, to improve the benchmarking of data.
Companies and organizations are encouraged to make the Embodied Carbon Database a success by contributing data to the project using a simple template on the WRAP Web site.
