Why are we asking for data, what type do we want and how much?
It’s simple and we are pretty sure someone famous said “You cannot know where you’re going without knowing where you’ve been.” Well it’s the same for SE 2050; we aim to collect structural system impacts so that we can track industry trends and set appropriate and achievable targets over time.
In an ideal world, we would have structural material quantities at both the design and construction stages, with the associated embodied carbon impacts and material procurement impacts from the actual facilities and/or manufacturers. Such information would allow one to make well-informed decisions throughout the full life cycle of the building.
Currently, however, environmental impact information does not exist for every material in every manufacturing facility in all regions of the country. While this is rapidly changing, our baseline ask is that you provide the structural material quantities of your project with the associated embodied carbon impacts from the source of embodied carbon impacts of your choice whether that be from industry-wide average or facility specific EPDs or the total embodied carbon from commercially available LCA software.
Though you will have the option to provide embodied carbon values only we highly encourage you to choose the commitment level that requires you to provide structural material quantities as well. Such quantities allow for industry comparisons of material efficiency as well as the best opportunity to check if the embodied carbon numbers make sense.
We’ve broken the data commitment into three tiers as shown in the table below.
