Photo courtesy Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance’s (FGIA)
Participants at the Fenestration and Glazing Industry Alliance’s (FGIA) annual conference were given the opportunity to take part in an interactive session entitled, “The EC3 Tool for Glazing and Fenestration Products | Facilitating Improvements in the EPD System.” It was presented by Phil Northcott, of Building Transparency. The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool is a free database of construction environmental product declarations (EPDs) and matching building impact calculator for use in design and material procurement.
Northcott shared building operations, meaning all buildings, including existing ones, create 28 percent of global emissions and that the embodied carbon of building materials contributes to 11 percent of global emissions, including new construction and renovations.
“Now is the time to start paying more attention to embodied carbon,” he says. “The EC3 tool is a free and easy-to-use tool that allows benchmarking, assessment and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials.”
Using artificial intelligence (AI), Northcott’s company digitized EPDs, resulting in a database of 135,000 of them, which include products from more than 1,800 companies in 67 countries. “More than 44,000 people use the tool, primarily architects and those in construction as well as sustainability consulting professionals,” says Northcott.
Northcott explained that an EPD is like a food label, listing a product’s environmental impact. It contains published, verifiable life cycle assessment (LCA) results with the proprietary data hidden. He pointed out that the fenestration and glazing industry, including many FGIA members, is working hard to get their section of the EC3 tool into better shape, but that there is much work to be done. “A bunch of categories in EC3 deal with glazing,” Northcott says. “But Europe is doing better than the U.S. with fenestration and glazing EPDs at this time.”
Northcott then pulled up the EC3 tool itself to demonstrate how to use it. “You can search geographically, by properties, by several parameters,” he says. “You can view results and see performance stats, how it compares to the industry as a whole. It’s all available in the tool.”
For more about the EC3 tool, visit Building Transparency’s website.
