Companies operating in infrastructure and the built environment are leading the way in measuring and advancing sustainability and circular economy principles. The latest front in this pursuit of green solutions is quantifying “embodied carbon”
ALCAS members have long supported the Green Building Council of Australia and the Infrastructure Sustainability Council in quantifying embodied carbon emissions. More recently both NABERS and BASIX are developing embodied carbon requirements for buildings.
ALCAS itself has co-developed tools that allow the market to understand embodied emissions, communicate performance and work with stakeholders to reduce emissions.
EPD-Australasia facilitates the verification, registration and publication of Environment Product Declarations (EPDs) based on international LCA standards. EPDs provide a transparent and comparable benchmark. At the time of writing, 88% of all EPDs published in Australia fall into the infrastructure and construction categories.
The AusLCI database provides a national, publicly accessible database on a wide range of Australian products and services across their entire life cycle. The AusLCI database is an ongoing project, with new data added regularly. The AusLCI database is available free to all ALCAS corporate members. To enable a wider use of AusLCI, ALCAS has recently decided to extract a set of greenhouse gas emission factors for the building sector that can be used free-of-charge.
As the President of ALCAS, I urge all stakeholders to work together on using these tools to continue to advance the cause of sustainability and to finally embed embodied carbon requirements in our building codes.