Farshid Bonakdar is a Principal Engineering Consultant at RSK Materials and Structures
Due to the high carbon footprint of concrete, finding alternatives remains a priority in construction, but the high durability and flexible workability of cement make this quite difficult, if not impossible, for the immediate future.
Since we are unlikely to find a material that can replace cement anytime soon, we need to take a scientific approach to how we build. This includes answering crucial questions with care and evidence and in the most responsible and truthful manner.
“Life cycle assessments are powerful tools that can help us get out of this dark part of our history, but only if they are fed with the right information”
Where we can, we should use and refurbish existing structures, maximizing creativity and architectural innovation. For every new build environment, we need to ask questions like, do we need to build a new one? Is the current design the most environmentally sustainable solution? Are there other materials that could serve this purpose with a lower carbon footprint? Techniques such as life cycle assessment and carbon footprint analysis can be implemented to provide scientific and evidence-based answers to these questions.
Life cycle assessment is a methodology for assessing the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product’s life cycle. A reliable life cycle assessment includes all upstream and downstream processes specifically associated with the product throughout its complete life cycle. In the built environment, this means everything from the extraction and processing of raw materials, through the manufacture, distribution and use of the product, to the end-of-life scenarios that might be conservatively considered for the product , be it disposal, reuse or recycling. .
Each of the elements throughout the life cycle of a product requires the advice of specialists from relevant disciplines, including environmental consultants, planners, structural engineering consultants, material specialists and energy assessors, to contribute to the acquisition of data on potential alternatives that could be considered a built environment and can meet the technical criteria. It involves preparing a project-specific life cycle assessment with a set of data that relates to a specific system at a specific location and that takes into account the specific materials, suppliers and construction processes for all alternatives in order to select the one with the least. carbon footprint throughout the life cycle envisaged for the alternatives.
A complex problem
Unfortunately, these tools are not being used in the way they deserve to be and were originally intended to serve policy makers and decision makers. Due to the large number of parameters that contribute to a product’s full life cycle carbon footprint and the complex interrelated nature of the system within the product life cycle, commercial shortcuts have become readily available. Universal life cycle assessment inventories that provide initial data to perform the necessary calculations during a product or system assessment have gained great popularity among practitioners and environmental professionals because they provide simple and quick answers for such a complex problem.
Life cycle assessments and carbon footprints are powerful tools that can help us get out of this dark part of our history, but only if they are fed with the right information.
For many, it is too much to consider, so despite its built-in power and potential, life cycle assessment has sometimes been left as a luxury approach that appears in certain projects, mainly for marketing purposes. . This puts carbon footprint analyzes in danger of becoming de facto, using pre-set universal data sets for a quick and easy number of boxes to tick rather than being used to make strategic decisions.
Just as we realized that without a legally supported design code, our built environments could not provide an adequate, safe and secure asset for a 21st century human being, we must recognize that selecting construction techniques , materials and a development plan that follows the minimum carbon footprint is equally critical.
To get to this point, society and governments need to see professionals, practitioners, asset owners and developers acting as role models, performing life cycle assessment during critical decision-making phases. Governments around the world need to see us interested and committed to the most sustainable solutions. The more this approach can be properly demonstrated in meaningful projects, the more important it is that it is legally applied, ultimately creating its own cradle to move forward with sufficient workable arguments.
