Aiguasol harnesses One Click LCA to drive innovation in sustainable building design

"In the sustainable building department, we provide LCA and carbon expertise across markets. We intervene from the design stage to the execution of the project, and we work on new construction and rehabilitation projects, depending on the environmental goal. This is why we choose One Click LCA as the motor to handle our carbon assessments." 

—Lissette Campoverde, LCA Built Environment Specialist at Aiguasol 

Collaborative decision-making for a sustainable future 

We use One Click LCA to help us reduce a project's carbon emissions and establish communication channels with the many key stakeholders involved in each project, including the client, architects, engineers, carbon accounting, and so on. It's important that we have a data system in place to keep everyone updated during the different stages of the project and to be able to generate a report outlining the desired environmental goals, building certification, or legal frameworks.

Case study: Infinito Delicias, an award-winning rehabilitation project in Spain

Infinito Delicias

Transforming a 5-story office building combined with an industrial warehouse into a cultural center for citizens, enterprises, and foundations

• 2780.3 m2 rehabilitation project
• Reference period: 60 years
• System boundary: Embodied carbon [A1-A5] [B1-B5] [C1-C4]; D [Benefits]
• 📍Madrid, Spain

The project and key sustainable building practices

Infinito Delicias, led by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, is an example of a holistic rehabilitation of an industrial building into a lively cultural hub. One of the significant achievements of the project is the reuse of 95% of the existing structure. The design emphasizes material circularity through the nearly exclusive use of biomaterials and recycled elements, such as biodegradable cork insulation and locally sourced pine wood.

Aiguasol, alongside SOCOTEC Spain, conducted a bioclimatic assessment of the building to address thermal comfort, minimizing the environmental impact of the operational energy and reducing reliance on mechanical ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

Using One Click LCA to reduce embodied carbon and improve team cohesion

The main concern for the architectural design team was to compare and quantify the traditional design (545 kg Co2e/m2) versus a rehabilitation design (240 kg Co2e/m2). Using One Click LCA, we could see that the rehabilitation project resulted in a 50% embodied carbon reduction through reusing the structure and employing regenerative materials. The reports also gave us insights into the impact of regenerative materials on reducing the total embodied carbon emissions.

Award-winning results

Infinito Delicias received the Holcim Gold Europe Award in 2023 for reusing a large portion of the structure and selecting regenerative materials. The jury also praised the project's "thoroughness and clarity" in communicating sustainable features, metrics, and outcomes that offered "a robust understanding of the project’s impact." For me, this comment showcased how LCA is a tool that can help optimize the design.

Case study: Velindre Cancer Center, aiming to design 'UK's Greenest Hospital' in Wales

Velindre Cancer Center

A new 4-storey health care center building designed to serve more than 1.5 million people

• 55361 m2 new building project
• Reference period: 60 years
• System boundary: Embodied carbon [A1-A5] [B1-B5] [C1-C4]; D [Benefits]
• 📍Cardiff, Wales

The project and key objectives:

For the new Velindre Cancer Center (an ongoing project), the goals are to be a high-performance, low-energy hospital and to achieve a BREEAM "Outstanding" and "Excellent" building certification. In terms of embodied carbon, the objectives are to align with respective benchmarking for the UK and construction sector (e.g., NHS upfront carbon limit, RIBA 2030, LETI) and become a net zero building.

In this project, our role is to support the decision-making of the architectural design team based on solutions with the best-performing carbon emissions and to generate the overall figures for the hospital for stage 3 (spatial coordination) and stage 4 (detailed design) of the project.

The baseline reference from the previous stage was 350 kg CO2/m2. Since we didn't work on the previous stages for this project, this means that sometimes LCAs are conducted with missing information or with projections that aren't realistic, which can be challenging for managing client expectations. So we had to gather additional information from budgets, BIM modeling, a construction cloud, etc.

Looking ahead 

Moving forward, I think the construction industry needs to be more engaged with the secondary materials market, promoting practices such as urban mining and encouraging manufacturers to collect data from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), especially in the service sector, which has highly complex buildings. Also, it's important to be able to work more digitally. You can imagine how much time and effort goes into collecting information, material by material, for a hospital. Luckily, we have EPDs and software, like One Click LCA, to facilitate this work, but there is still much to do. Perhaps AI can be integrated into automating some of the data modeling or improving the data gap.