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It’s quite a light feeling building.’.

This enables us to make better, sustainable design choices, and to improve a building’s performance right from the start.We look at issues such as the material choice for a building’s facade and structure, as well as energy performance and thermal comfort.

These are evaluated with respect to the passing of time.What will happen year on year, and at the end of a building’s life?.Embodied carbon in sustainable building design.

One of the core issues we’re trying to tackle with sustainable design revolves around carbon.We know a lot about operational carbon and how buildings operate.

Data helps us to close the performance gap and make sure buildings perform as well as, or even better than, they do in the design stage.

As we’re able to drive better and better performance through energy efficient equipment and passive design techniques, we can actually start reducing our operational carbon right from the early design stages.There is a perception across the construction industry that operational carbon is more significant than embodied carbon.

Our results show that operational carbon is expected to account for around a third of whole life carbon over the next 60 years (decarbonisation of the electricity grid is not currently accounted for).This operational carbon is based on NABERS Design for Performance modelling and is monitored during the building’s first year of occupation.. At two thirds of the whole life carbon of a building, embodied carbon is critical to address in the early design stages and provides the greatest opportunity for overall carbon impact reduction..

Operational carbon vs embodied carbon.When considering how design choices impact embodied carbon, the data only supports the upfront carbon due to incomplete data for whole life carbon (WLC) for the BaU scheme (in 2018 the industry wasn’t regularly considering WLC calculations for projects)..