TL;DR
Our Covering Embodied Carbon series provides a much clearer picture of the significant impacts that embodied carbon emissions have on the environment and the pressing need to address it. Let’s sum up what was covered:
1) What is it? Embodied carbon is the green house gas emissions from the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials.
2) Why should I care? By 2040, embodied will account for approximately 50% of the built environment’s emissions; making it critical to address, increasingly regulated and standardised, and a more sort after building criterion.
3) How do I measure it? Embodied carbon can be calculated using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Whole Life Carbon Assessment (WLCA) tools.
4) What is an EPD? An EPD is basically a standardised summary report of a LCA which allows you to determine the carbon footprint of a product/material prior to purchase.
5) What do I do about it? Ensure that you consult with industry professionals and the various regulations, standards, certification systems, and guides available. The following principles are a good universal starting point: build nothing, build less, build clever, build efficiently, minimise waste, specify low-carbon, and offset.
6) When can I reduce it? It is critical to use carbon assessment tools as early as possible in the project development process, with the planning and early design stages holding the greatest carbon reduction potentials.
Preoptima is built on over a decade of academic research addressing the problems of embodied and whole life carbon, providing the latest science and leading insight into the above questions of what, why, and how, which we feel is our moral duty to put to good use. We determined that the following four properties are essential for a LCA and WLC tool that can reduce hundreds of megatons of carbon at a global scale - a game-changing impact that actually moves the needle in fighting the climate crisis: i) Quality of underpinning science, ii) Superiority, transparency, accuracy, and continuous improvement of data sets, iii) AI and generative design, iv) Live carbon figures throughout the entire building lifecycle - from concept to demolition. Preoptima is a software solution that solves for all of the industry’s LCA pain points, saving you time, money, and carbon.
Our software can be used during the earliest stages of design, before any time and resources have been wasted, and throughout the entire building lifecycle. Our generative design tool can be used as early as the concept and feasibility stage to analyse hundreds of thousands of building designs for you using your specified inputs, providing you with a handful optimised low-carbon designs to assess and compare.
But we don’t stop there, because what would be the point in that? Preoptima also provides live carbon performance of more detailed design choices in real-time, tracks and provides accurate as-built carbon figures during construction, tracks the embodied carbon component of critical building retrofits and monitors operational carbon during the use stage, and finally ensures that the embodied carbon cost of demolition is correctly factored into decision-making at the end of life of the building. Preoptima is the only tool on the market that can provide the ability to track both embodied and operational carbon throughout the entire life cycle of a building - from concept to demolition - serving as a ‘Carbon Hub’ for all of your projects.
Why do we pride ourselves on covering the full scope of the building lifecycle? Because evaluating and incorporating the Whole Life Carbon of buildings into building designs and decision-making processes is essential if we are to achieve the Paris Agreement by 2050 - and who better than our talented team to build the software that can do it? Contact us at info@preoptima.com if you would like to hear more about our software or request a demo. Come and join us on our change and save the world mission!