Materials Compass | One Click LCA

Written by Asha Ramachandran | Oct 29 2024

The new tool gives access to the construction industry's largest sustainability dataset of over 250,000 products. Finding and choosing lower-carbon products allows reductions that can exceed one-third of total carbon footprint.

October 29, 2024 — According to a WBGC study, buildings are responsible for 39% of global energy related carbon emissions, with 11% from materials and construction. Further, a global 2024 study by One Click LCA demonstrates that up to 90% of construction professionals see insufficient product environmental data as an impediment to selecting lower-carbon materials in their projects.

To solve this challenge, One Click LCA — the leading sustainability platform for construction and manufacturing — has now launched the Materials Compass. Materials Compass gives designers, engineers, and specifiers access to the world’s largest construction life-cycle assessment (LCA) database, showing the environmental impact of more than 250,000 construction products. With comprehensive global data, Materials Compass helps construction industry professionals make more data-driven decisions throughout the design and construction process, select lower-carbon materials, and ultimately reduce carbon emissions from construction projects — via verified environmental product declarations (EPDs) and other product sustainability data.

“We want to embed decarbonization into the design and construction process, instead of it being an afterthought. Materials Compass brings all the global EPDs together for designers, buyers, and specifiers. This makes finding and choosing lower-carbon and sustainable materials easy.”

- Panu Pasanen, the CEO & Founder of One Click LCA

There can be significant differences between materials on the market. According to One Click LCA data, carbon emissions can be more than one-third lower if people select the lowest-carbon materials compared to the highest-carbon choices available. The result is carbon reduction potential for projects that select the lower-carbon options.

In the research cited above, almost 90% of construction industry professionals say the lack of EPDs — verified documents that demonstrate a product's environmental impact — is the most limiting factor for LCA and embodied carbon reduction. One of Material Compass's key and first-in-the-industry benefits is that it provides a complete overview of all global EPDs for construction materials on the platform, letting construction industry professionals compare the carbon impact of different materials side-by-side.

“Our goal is to integrate all qualifying construction material data, including EPD, CFP, TM65, and generic datasets, as soon as it's available worldwide. All data undergoes a rigorous quality review by our experts, who leverage AI-based and proprietary tools. Where industry data is lacking, we also produce high-quality generic LCA data for key materials like concrete, steel, wood, glass, plastics, and textiles.”

- Jani Tierala, Head of LCA Data at One Click LCA

The platform brings together data from multiple sources, including EPDs, carbon footprints of products, and generic life-cycle assessment data, making it easier to make informed decisions.

Key features of Materials Compass include:

Navigate easy, yet advanced, search of a global database
Find locally-available and lower-carbon materials
Compare products and find the best lower-carbon materials
Create and share material specifications
Scale-up your sustainability initiatives quickly

On Thursday, December 05, One Click LCA is hosting the Winter Sustainability Summit 2024 — the world’s largest online event about how materials selection can drive decarbonization of the construction industry. Registration is free and open to the public, streaming in 7 time zones to ensure you can attend.

About One Click LCA

One Click LCA is the world-leading end-to-end sustainability platform for construction and manufacturing. The software platform decarbonizes and drives sustainability across the construction value chain with scientific, easy-to-use, automated life-cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental product declarations (EPDs) to calculate and reduce the environmental impacts of building, infrastructure, and renovation projects and products. The platform also allows assessment of circularity, life-cycle cost, and biodiversity. One Click LCA is used in 170+ countries, with a unique global database with +250,000 LCA datasets; supports +80 standards and certifications, including LEED, BREEAM, GRESB and other national regulations; and seamlessly integrates with +20 of the most widely used BIM software tools, including Autodesk Revit®, Tekla Structures® and Bentley iTwin®. One Click LCA was founded in Helsinki, Finland in 2001, with a team of +200 people on all continents. Learn more at: oneclicklca.com.

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