Carbon Heroes Benchmark Program – whole building embodied carbon profiling

Reducing the embodied carbon of the building stock requires a better understanding of the life cycle impacts of the materials used in those buildings. However, the characteristics of the building stock vary significantly by geography and building type. The “Carbon heroes benchmark program” is a cooperative initiative for carbon profiling by building type across different countries. The program’s aim is to create uniform, full life-cycle of materials benchmarks for common building types. The benchmark program is on track to achieve 1000 fully completed and verified buildings by end of 2019, and contains data breakdowns for over 100 different material types and essential structural parts of a building. All data used in the program is rigorously anonymized and statistically small sets of data are also not used to protect data anonymity. The program implements the EN 15978/ISO 21930 standards as the basis of measurement, and includes life-cycle stages A1-A3, A4, B4-B5, and C1-C4. This presentation will share the preliminary findings of this project. 659 verified buildings (February 2019 cutoff), with substantial datasets for many European countries for some of the most common building types. The benchmark is generated using One Click LCA.