Civil engineers play an important role in reducing the embedded carbon footprint of the construction industry. Trimble Business Development Manager Sakari Lahti explains how small decisions on the desk can have a huge impact on our planet
One of my interests as a structural engineer is to help other engineers design buildings that are more sustainable. My work is particularly focused on concrete, as this is where our industry has excellent opportunities to make carbon reductions in design, materials engineering and during the construction phase. I joined Tekla in 2013 as an application manager focused on growing our global precast business. As sustainability became a more pressing issue, I soon saw that optimizing a building to minimize its embedded carbon is done with similar mechanisms to those used to calculate material costs. I therefore had the idea to make embodied carbon a design parameter in our software, so we validated the need and continued with the development.
Over the past decade, I have seen that not everyone in our industry is aware of the benefits of BIM, Building Information Modeling. BIM is fundamentally about improving the entire construction process, with data as a value-adding factor.
In the early days of BIM, this was not fully understood. For example, saying "a thicker wall has higher volumes and you can export all this information to a spreadsheet" doesn't really help the designer understand the impact of making the wall thicker. The benefit of BIM becomes much clearer when you can dynamically see both the cost and the embedded carbon impact of a proposed design decision.
Why is this important?
As designers, we have the power to make a huge positive impact on minimizing CO2. Our professional decisions have a much bigger impact than anything we do in our private lives. For example, if I choose not to take a flight from my home in Finland to a city in Italy, I save about 300 kg of CO2. If I go on a plant-based diet, I can save 500 kg of CO2 every year. Driving a hybrid car can save 600 kg over the course of a year, while going completely car-free can double that.
