Stand-alone calculation tools are not the answer to embodied carbon assessment

Ariyaratne, Chamindika I. and Moncaster, Alice M. (2014). Stand-alone calculation tools are not the answer to embodied carbon assessment. Energy Procedia, 62 pp. 150–159.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2014.12.376

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that the importance of embodied carbon is growing in relation to assessing the environmental impact of buildings. This paper investigates how designers are looking to tackle this, and the effectiveness of some of the methods chosen. Although a number of commercial and non-commercial organisations are developing in-house tools to calculate embodied carbon, these lack the flexibility to be adopted by a wide range of users as well as the efficiency required to be appealing to designers at the early stages of a design. An alternative to these stand-alone tools is offered through the functionality of Building Information Modelling (BIM) software, which is capable of incorporating embodied carbon assessments as part of the normal design process. The potential of plug-in tools to obtain embodied carbon data from suppliers is an area that remains to be explored further