Residential Upfront Carbon

The residential sector has a few major differences in approaching embodied carbon to the commercial and multi-residential sectors:

• Usually no budget to have an LCA consultant on board or dedicated LCA software training
• Hard to get project-specific carbon values early enough to inform decisions
• There is no policy framework or incentive to tackle embodied carbon
• Its hard to know ‘where to start’
• The ‘key stakeholder’ might be a mum and dad who want to make a difference but don’t know how.

We decided that a tool specific to the residential sector would allow for conversations to start about embodied carbon over the dinner table.

A full LCA study will thoroughly examine every component of a project and reveal a highly granular level of information about the carbon footprint of a project. This has a place in the world of embodied carbon and we support conducting full LCA studies if budget permits.

However if an LCA is focused on calculating an ‘absolute’ carbon footprint for a single project, CarbonTrace is about using a consistent methodology to start understanding every home in Australia.

By utilising a consistent dataset (the mandatory Energy Certificate), Carbontrace starts to define a National baseline and compares a specific project against this baseline. Its focus is on carbon ‘Optioneering’ – comparing different material and construction types to find ways to do better than a National baseline.

We see that there are only a few ‘big ticket items’ which make up the bulk of the carbon footprint of a project. We believe that starting with these areas can identify meaningful reductions and make the process dramatically simpler.

We believe that starting somewhere is critical. We need to do this now, even if it is imperfect. 

If you are asking this question, you might be asking which is the ‘right’ co-efficient dataset? There are a few certainties in life: death, taxes and disagreement about carbon coefficients.

At CarbonTrace, we are ‘Co-efficient Agnostic’. We believe in consistency of process, but see these carbon values as dynamic, ever-improving and only one piece of the puzzle.

 CarbonTrace is currently using Australian EPD where it is available, through EPD Australasia.  We hope to utilise the default emission factors currently being developed by NABERs and move in lockstep to progress being made in the commercial sector.

We see a critical need to connect the investment by manufacturers into low carbon material with design teams and home owners who can specify them and understand how they can reduce the impact of a project. For this reason we strongly support the development and integration of EPD’s and hope to introduce supplier-specific carbon values into our platform.

The carbon footprint is fundamentally: ‘amount of stuff’ x ‘carbon intensity of stuff’ = ‘carbon footprint’

Lets say the ‘carbon intensity of stuff’ is for now a generic material EPD co-efficient, but could easily be supplier specific or from a different dataset.

Then how do you calculate the ‘amount of stuff’?

CarbonTrace is essentially a Bill of Quantities generator, using calculators and algorithms developed over many years by Grenville Architectural Construction. It is a complex process which makes a number of construction assumptions based on Australian Standards, building codes and actual building practises. It is born from the coal face of a building company, rather than an academic understanding of what should theoretically be involved.

The CarbonTrace outputs have been validated through the ‘As-Built’ material volumes accumulated by Grenville Architectural Construction. These have been collected over fourteen years of live projects and lived experience.