Embodied carbon study drives sustainable biopharma design
When planning a sustainable facility, you’d be remiss to only look at your facility’s operational carbon and not consider its embodied carbon. Operational carbon is just a piece of the picture.
Leveraging embodied carbon with LCAs on CapEx projects
Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are becoming increasingly important as industry interest and new LEED v5 requirements emphasize understanding embodied carbon—the often-overlooked greenhouse gas emissions associated with a building’s entire lifespan beyond operational energy.
Embodied carbon encompasses emissions from raw material extraction and manufacturing of building components, all the way through construction, renovation, and eventual demolition. For new construction projects, LCAs typically focus on structure and enclosure elements due to the carbon-intensive nature of materials such as steel and concrete. Conversely, LCAs for interior buildouts evaluate the entire scope, often highlighting emission sources that traditionally receive less attention. Conducting an LCA offers facility owners two key advantages: it clearly identifies and quantifies the building’s—and, by extension, the company’s—true carbon footprint and provides valuable insights that inform facility design optimization, effectively reducing both greenhouse gas emissions and capital expenditures.
Benefits:
- Identify and account for your building and company’s true carbon footprint
- Use this information to optimize the facility design, reducing both greenhouse gases and CapEx
The term embodied carbon refers to all of the greenhouse gas emissions tied to a product’s lifecycle, starting with the extraction of raw materials, and continuing through manufacturing, transport, and construction. Because there are a variety of greenhouse gases to standardize these calculations, the industry uses the global warming potential equivalent baselined to Carbon Dioxide, which is where we get the phrase embodied carbon. This is written CO2e or Carbon Dioxide equivalent. The output of an embodied carbon study provides the total intensity impact of the building over its lifespan in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions per square meter (kgCO2e/m²). However, it is not just a data-gathering and tracking exercise; it is a test of design implications, subcontractor communications, and trustworthy industry-average EPDs.
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a study used to evaluate the environmental impact of a product or material over its entire life cycle. In the context of buildings, an LCA typically assesses the total embodied carbon of the products and materials used in the project — or, in other words, it can be thought of as the sum of LCAs performed on the individual components, or Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Although the building’s embodied carbon is often the focus of this effort, the study can also include quantification of the building’s impact on the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, acidification of land and water sources, eutrophication, formation of tropospheric ozone, and depletion of nonrenewable energy resources.
Embodied carbon drives sustainable design improvements for a biopharma manufacturer
Challenge:
A future-focused biopharma company recently turned to CRB’s sustainability team to ensure they were capturing both of the above-listed LCA benefits and taking it a step further. The client wanted to reduce embodied carbon by 20% when compared to their standard buildings.
Approach:
In line with LCA best practice, this project’s assessment started early in the design process, incorporating regular updates throughout construction to reconcile materials and reflect the project’s embodied carbon reality. There is a delta between the materials purchased and the materials used, and understanding that waste becomes an important detail when calculating actual embodied carbon.
Opportunity:
Continuous, optimized emissions tracking allowed for the discovery of multiple design and material opportunities throughout the project, which reduced the overall carbon footprint.
- Optimizing Available EPDs. The greatest opportunity discovered was within the interior’s finishes. Given the information available, finishes like paint and flooring were prioritized and reassessed with the design team. Because CRB owned both the design and the LCA on the project, communicating this need was seamless and straightforward.
- Close Coordination with Subcontractors. Another known greenhouse gas heavy hitter, concrete, was also on our team’s radar, and we actively set out to reduce the project’s concrete related emissions. After pushing back on the supplier’s concrete suggestions, we were presented with a previously unmentioned mix that registered far better than the regional baseline for CO2 without compromising integrity. When asked, this concrete vendor provided us with several sustainable options, all with even greater positive impacts.
- Recycled Metals. Any metal components were raised for optimization as a major contributor to the project’s total embodied carbon. As such, structural steel with a high recycled content was proposed where appropriate, helping to reduce emissions without compromising structural requirements.
- Material Reduction. The single best thing you can do to reduce the embodied carbon is to reduce the amount of material needed, especially for labs and clean spaces. The project’s reduction in air change rates led to fewer air handling units and ductwork, which reduced HVAC-related embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions, CapEx, and OpEx. The use of open ceilings further eliminated ceiling materials and simplified duct layouts.
Results:
In this instance, CRB actively assessed the facility’s interior build-out, with detailed assumptions to account for the building’s existing exterior. The interior build-out included the assessment of finishes, fittings, furnishings, equipment, MEP services, structural components, façade, transportation to the site, waste and more. In the end, galvanized steel ductwork, structural steel, gypsum board, and carbon steel pipes were Identified as the most significant materials in the project’s cradle-to-grave LCA.
CRB’s embodied carbon and LCA services
An LCA is more than just a reporting tool, it’s a powerful driver for sustainable optimization. It enables sustainable decision-making from design and material selection through construction to ensure the highest level of environmental standards and planning are met. Whether you’re aiming for LEED certification or simply want to build smarter and greener, talk to our sustainability experts today to get an embodied carbon study included in your next project or LEED certification.
