California-based Charles Pankow Foundation has announced a grant to the University of Washington for development of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) to advance transparency in the construction industry. By enabling a performance-based approach to embodied carbon reductions in design, procurement, and construction, the EC3 team aims to provide climate conscious building owners tools to make more informed decisions about the materials going into their projects.
The goal of the EC3 project is to build a robust, open source, publicly available material embodied carbon database, easily sorted and statistically compared. The database can be used to create credible embodied carbon project budgets and consistently track targets during construction.
Principal investigator for the project is Kate Simonen of the University of Washington-hosted Carbon Leadership Forum, in collaboration with Phil Northcott at C-Change Labs. The Pankow Foundation acknowledges the American Institute of Architects and American Institute of Steel Construction for contributions to the EC3 grant, plus MKA Foundation, Interface, Microsoft and Skanska USA for significant industry sponsorship.