The EC3 or Embodied Carbon Calculator, is a tool that can be used to benchmark, assess, and ultimately reduce embodied carbon. The EC3 was developed by the Energy Studies Institute of the National University of Singapore who have made it freely available to anyone who needs it.
What Does It Do?
The EC3 allows everyone from building owners to policy makers to accurately assess supply chain data in order to formulate Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) requirements and establish embodied carbon limits and reductions at the project and construction material level.
You can integrate the EC3 tool into the design and procurement phases of a given construction project and use it to calculate, with a high degree of accuracy, the overall amount of embodied carbon emissions. This, in turn, enables you to investigate low carbon options.
The tool has had the effect of jump-starting demand for low-carbon alternatives while at the same time incentivising manufacturers and suppliers to invest in innovative solutions that reduce the level of carbon emitted by their products.
Fulfilling An Important Role
Until now, material suppliers have found it difficult to publish accurate Environmental Product Declarations as required to analyse embedded carbon emissions, simply because they had no reliable way to measure them. To make matters worse the few EPDs that did exist were often only found in proprietary databases and so inaccessible to others.
With the EC3 tool, however, construction companies, designers and suppliers have, for the first time, access to thousands of EPDs stored in a free open source database. As a result, they will be able to easily measure, compare and be able to reduce the embodied carbon in a building project.
Since being launched several years ago EC3 has been used effectively on numerous pilot projects, including the building of the new, ultra high-tech Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. Time and again it has proven its ability to empower builders to compare and contrast products and reduce the amount of embodied carbon by a significant degree and in a cost-effective manner.
Conclusion
Put an end to the uncertainty swirling around EPDs and effectively reduce the amount of embodied carbon on your building projects with the EC3 tool.
To find out more, get in touch with Qflow by using the contact form on this website.
