Actuate UK, the alliance of eight UK engineering services bodies, has welcomed CIBSE’s new Embodied Carbon Calculator tool, which, ‘for the first time’, enables engineers to easily estimate the embodied carbon associated with mechanical, electrical, and public health systems in buildings.
The digital tool is designed to support consultants, researchers, and manufacturers to implement CIBSE TM65 Embodied carbon in building services: a calculation methodology, by performing the calculations set out in the document. CIBSE Technical Memorandum 65, published last year, enables the calculation of embodied carbon of building services equipment when no Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) is available.
Actuate UK said: “Embodied carbon is associated with the extraction of materials, manufacture, repair, disassembly, and disposal. Environmental product declarations (EPDs) are a standardised way of showing the embodied carbon and other environmental impacts of a product. However, because of the complexity of building services products and their supply chains, very few building services equipment manufacturers offer EPDs.”
Paul Reeve from Actuate UK’s Net Zero Group said: “Communicating the embodied carbon of electrical and electronic equipment and other building services products is a new challenge and opportunity for our sector. Buyers are increasingly requiring mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) contractors to show how they are including embodied carbon in their carbon impact measurements. The new toolkit provides a technically sound, but also highly pragmatic, approach to help both manufacturers and contractors achieve this”.
To use the digital Embodied Carbon Calculator tool, a manufacturer will complete the Manufacturer Form describing the materials used in the product. Using this data, a user can complete either a basic embodied carbon calculation, when limited information is available, or ‘a more robust’ mid-level calculation. Once the user has added contact details and completed consent to publication details, the result may be used as a self-assessed value for the embodied carbon of the product.