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Embodied Carbon

You can enter data on the embodied carbon that is associated with the material. This definition for embodied energy is provided on the Bath ICE website:

Embodied energy may be taken as the total primary energy consumed during resource extraction, transportation, manufacturing and fabrication of a product... to separate it from operational impacts.

Likewise embodied carbon is the carbon released in the above processes. It has become common practice to specify the embodied carbon as ‘Cradle to Gate’, which includes all carbon until the product leaves the factory gate. The final boundary condition is ‘Cradle to Site’, which includes all of the carbon emitted until the product has reached the point of use (i.e. the building site).

Embodied carbon available

If embodied carbon data is available for the material then this check box should to ticked.

Embodied carbon

Enter the amount of embodied carbon associated with the material. When using SI units, the units are kgCO2/kg.

Conversion factor name

Enter the name of the conversion factor as defined in the source documentation. This can be used to help you to trace the conversion factor back within the source database.

Source

The source of the data in text form. Much of the data provided by DesignBuilder is derived from the Bath ICE database.

Assumption / factor boundary

Typically embodied energy is defined as the carbon emitted into the atmosphere in order to mine, process and produce the material. Some common definitions are:

• Cradle to Gate - the carbon emitted to bring the material to the factory gate (but not to transport it to the building site)
• Cradle to Site - as above but additionally includes consideration of transport from factory to the building site.

Equivalent carbon available

If data on equivalent carbon is available then check this box.

Equivalent carbon

Equivalent carbon is similar to Embodied carbon (above) but also includes the effects of other greenhouse gases so as to provide an equivalent amount of CO2 that would cause the same amount of global warming as the actual greenhouse gases (which may include sulphur dioxide, methane etc) emitted by the processes involved in production of the material.

Embodied Carbon Report

Material, construction and glazing inventories and embodied carbon reports are included in the CSV report file. An example simple report is shown below. The materials and constructions inventories are equivalent ways of showing the same data, but broken down in different ways. The total for the building is shown at the bottom.