Design Solution · Sustainability
Design Solution · Dream about it
LCA of embodied carbon informs material selection.
A life-cycle assessment of embodied carbon is run during design so the team can choose lower-carbon materials and specify against a green-guide rating. Making the carbon number visible early changes specification before it is locked in.
Running a life-cycle assessment of embodied carbon during design to steer material selection is now embedded in RIBA Plan of Work 2020, LETI guidance and GLA planning requirements, so it sits in the category of emerging standard practice rather than frontier innovation. The value is in the timing: making carbon visible at Stage 2 or 3 — before specifications are locked — allows material substitutions that become impractical or expensive to revisit after procurement. The honest limitation is data quality: embodied carbon assessments rely on environmental product declarations and generic database values whose accuracy varies widely, and the difference between manufacturer-specific EPD values and database averages can be large enough to change the ranking of competing materials — the assessment is only as good as the data inputs it draws on. Green guide ratings, which remain a BREEAM compliance route, use aggregated values that can be considerably coarser than a project-specific LCA; they are a planning proxy, not a reliable material selection tool. No evidenced deployments appear on this record, which is a gap in cataloguing rather than practice — embodied carbon assessment is performed on every BREEAM Excellent and EPC-A project of any scale. The most useful thing a specifier can do is ensure the structural engineer and M&E consultant are contributing to the assessment rather than treating it as an architect-led box-ticking exercise; the structural frame and MEP plant represent the majority of a building's embodied carbon and are the levers that move the number.
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