carbon benchmarking methodology

How can anyone tell how good or bad an idea is? Only if someone has alternatives to compare with.  

The method presented here is based on the creation of ALL THE TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE solutions of a certain building design and calculating the UPFRONT CARBON values.

The method follows these steps:

1. Gathering an up-to-date EPD database of commonly used construction materials. The kgCO2 values were obtained from these open databases bellow:

ÖKOBAUDAT

Institut Bauen und Umwelt e.V. 

The GWP (Global Warming Potential) values come mainly from German or Austrian firms' EPDs. No localization was performed to Hungarian energy mix.

The effect of additional material transport to the construction site was not considered. 

2. Definition of the building geometry and deriving areas, quantities needed for the analysis.

• building width

• building length

• story height

• story number

• roof sloping angle

3. Creating commonly used structural assembly for different building structures, such as foundation, walls, etc... These come from my HUNGARIAN design practice.

4. Using "Cross Reference" all the mathematically possible combination was created using different assembly groups.

5. Filtering of technically wrong solutions was done. For example rc floor slab can not be placed on timber framed walls.

6. The result of the combinations were put in ordered list and were saved. 

The sequestation of timber was EXCLUDED from the calculation, only the fossil part of GWP was considered, to avoid negative values for timber structures. The exclusion of carbon capture results a less biased carbon evaluation. More information on this issue. 

The calculation was created in Grasshopper, which is a visual programming language and environment that runs within the Rhinoceros 3D computer-aided design (CAD) application and was created by David Rutten.