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Industry
Company size
Headquarters
Results
Consistent EPD mapping
Automated EPD matching at scale
Buro Happold's workflow uses One Click LCA's Materials API to match cost plan materials with suitable EPDs, reducing mismatches.
Earlier carbon insight
Less manual mapping, more time
Automating the most time-consuming step gives project teams carbon information earlier, while design choices remain open.
More high-value advice
More time for design advice
With less time on repetitive EPD matching, consultants can explore low-carbon alternatives and advise procurement teams.
The challenge
A whole life carbon assessment can take three to six weeks, with manual EPD selection and cost plan review consuming much of that time. Demand is rising: London requires major developments to submit assessments, while upcoming UK and EU regulation pushes disclosure into the mainstream. The challenge wasn't calculating carbon accurately, but scaling assessment without scaling manual work.
The solution
Buro Happold built an AI-powered workflow combining a large language model with One Click LCA's Materials API. It reads material descriptions from cost plans and matches each line to an appropriate EPD, drawing on predefined datasets, reference projects, or the One Click LCA database. Output: an Excel file of EPDs ready to import.
Outcome
Buro Happold can now standardize EPD mapping across large material datasets and reduce the repetitive matching work required from consultants. That creates more capacity for the work where consultants add the greatest value: testing design alternatives, advising on procurement strategy, and helping teams identify lower-carbon materials while decisions can still change.
“Automating EPD mapping frees up time to focus on what matters most to project teams: cost, procurement strategy, supply chain, and low-carbon products entering the market. That’s where consultants add the most value.”
Integrate and automate with One Click LCA's Materials API : Connect your systems to trusted carbon data.
A scale problem, not a precision problem
Buildings account for roughly 40% of global emissions, and as operational carbon falls, embodied carbon is becoming a larger share of total building emissions. At the same time, regulation is increasing the number of projects expected to measure and disclose whole life carbon. For Buro Happold, this creates a capacity challenge, if every assessment requires weeks of manual review, rising demand quickly becomes constrained by the number of skilled consultants available. The opportunity, then, is not to remove expert judgment but to automate the repetitive steps around it.
"This isn't a precision problem, it's a scale problem." — Rahul Grover, Associate Sustainability Consultant, Buro Happold
Automating one of the biggest bottlenecks
One of the most repetitive steps is matching hundreds or thousands of cost plan line items to appropriate EPDs. Buro Happold's application uses an LLM to interpret material descriptions and connects directly to the One Click LCA Materials API to find suitable environmental data. The API can return EPD-specific resource types and technical specifications, helping the workflow make more informed matches and reduce mapping errors. This creates a simple flow:
Cost plan → AI interpretation → One Click LCA Materials API → EPD mapping → One Click LCA project
The result is a structured dataset that consultants can review and use without manually searching for every EPD from scratch.
From carbon reporting to carbon decisions
The value of automation isn't simply faster reporting. By reducing the time consultants spend on repetitive data matching, Buro Happold can shift more effort toward the decisions that actually influence project carbon performance. At early design stage, the firm also uses parametric modeling to test different structural and material options, comparing carbon, cost, energy, and daylight while the design remains flexible.
"Our role should be to identify the best value carbon decisions, not just the lowest numbers." — Rahul Grover
The goal isn't simply to produce a carbon number faster, it's to give consultants more time to help project teams make better decisions with that information.
What's next for Buro Happold
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