Associating Environmental Data with Project Elements

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Associating Environmental Data with Project Elements

The LCA of a building consists of the sum of the LCAs of the products and equipment that constitute it. The principle of calculation is to calculate the impact of each element and then add them up. Environmental data are found in specialized databases according to the country or regulation used. For RE2020, the reference database is the INIES database (*). The data are contained in Environmental Declaration Sheets (FDES) for materials and Environmental Product Profiles (PEP) for equipment. All these data are stored and updated in the Carbonz database (the materials library), which also includes thermal data and complete construction systems that you can create with the integrated creation assistant.

Environmental data will thus be associated with each component of your project (foundation, walls, slabs, partitions…), materials, and equipment.

Contributor Table
Project data are organized in the LCA tree structure, divided into lots and grouped by homogeneous type to facilitate association with environmental data. The manipulation is done in the main table for manipulating and visualizing data: the contributor table.

Contributor Table

Each line of this table provides details on the environmental data affected and the impact of this line on the project or in its lot.

The important step of entering environmental sheets is done from the materials library. Once the product is selected from the database, it is assigned to the selected contributor. Carbonz recalculates the quantities based on the functional unit defined in the selected environmental data sheet.

For the choice of environmental data, Carbonz also offers the “Alternative” function, which allows you to replace an initial product with another less impactful one.

Decision support for analyzing and selecting the best construction systems. Products are positioned on a scale of increasing impacts.
Decision support for analyzing and selecting the best construction systems. Products are positioned on a scale of increasing impacts.

Types of Environmental Sheets:

To assign environmental data to a building composition, four types of sheets are available:

Individual Sheet
Individual Sheet

Established by manufacturers covering one or more commercial product references

Collective Sheet
Collective Sheet

This data is established by industry associations or manufacturers. It represents an average impact calculated for several product references, for example, for various products from the same range or for similar products from different manufacturers.

Configured Sheet
Configured Sheet

Established by the ministry in charge of construction to compensate for the lack of data on certain types of components. It has a relatively higher impact compared to individual and collective sheets. It is used if you do not have data.

Default Sheet
Default Sheet

Established by the ministry in charge of construction to compensate for the lack of data on certain types of components. It has a relatively higher impact compared to individual and collective sheets. It is used if you do not have data.

Conventional or service data
Conventional or service data

Established by the ministry in charge of housing and that of ecological transition. These data are used to assign impact allowances to certain LCA lots or impacts of different services (energy, water, transport, etc.).

If environmental data are still missing, Carbonz integrates the functionality of requesting data from the ministry on the Mlab site. This functionality is part of the RE2020 methodology.

Choosing an Environmental Sheet

The key to LCA calculation is to define as precisely as possible, for each element constituting it, the product (material, equipment, construction system) that will be implemented, and to retrieve the environmental data of this product from the Carbonz database.

However, not all products have a certified environmental sheet, and when a product does not have an individual sheet, the environmental data used are either:

  • A configured sheet
  • A collective sheet
  • Or finally, a regulatory default value.

Of course, the carbon data from these substitute sheets are much more penalizing than an individual sheet.The challenge for project design is therefore to choose, whenever possible, a product with an individual sheet to obtain a carbon calculation with the least impact possible.

Note: Manufacturers are thus invited to produce their environmental sheet and invest to reduce the carbon footprint of their product.