construction.

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the overall design, it is important allow

designers to make early-stage decisions using rules-of-thumb related to embodied CO2 emissions
of material types, and material sources. To allow engineers to quickly evaluate typical
construction materials sbp has created a suite of ‘Embodied Carbon Cheat Sheets’ (Figure 2).
The cheat sheets allow engineers to easily graphically compare the embodied CO2 emissions of a
defined mass of a material to understand which materials are more emission intensive. The cheat
sheets also allow engineers to easily graphically compare the embodied CO2 emissions
associated with different methods of transport (such as truck, rail, barge) for construction
materials over a range of distances. Together, these two pieces of information facilitate an
engineer to perform initial rough calculations of embodied carbon for both the manufacture of a
certain construction material and the transportation of that material to the project site (Figure 3).
The cheat sheets also provide an approximate threshold for when it may be more desirable to use
a new material that is locally produced, as opposed to transporting an existing material over
longer distances to a construction site.

Finally, in addition to providing an average material value, the cheat sheets also indicate the
upper and lower bound of the emission data to remind the engineer that these values are
approximate only and should be followed by more detailed LCA at a later project stage.

Figure 2 – Embodied Carbon Cheat Sheet – 10 short tons of material (Credit: sbp)