Concrete is one of the main contributors to the embodied carbon footprint of most buildings and infrastructure assets. It also offers one of the top quick win embodied carbon reduction measures. The specification of greener concrete mixtures has great potential to reduce the carbon footprint of construction.
Materials such as ground granulated blast furnace slag (ggbs) and pulverised fuel ash (pfa), have cementitious properties and can be used in a concrete mixture to reduce the amount of cement. Ordinary Portland Cement, or OPC as it is also known, has a higher embodied carbon than ggbs or pfa. The material pfa is also known as just fly ash.
Embodied Carbon Database
Circular Ecology has created an embodied carbon calculator for concrete, as part of the free embodied carbon database for materials known as the ICE database. The ICE database was originally created as a research project at the University of Bath by Dr Craig Jones, Circular Ecology, and Professor Geoffrey Hammond.
The latest version of the ICE database, V3, was updated by Circular Ecology and was co-funded by Heathrow Airport, the Rail Safety and Standards Board and the Environment Agency.
There is an excel version of the carbon calculator available with every download of the ICE database.
Embodied Carbon Calculator for Concrete
There is also an online version of the calculator available on this page.
The below calculator will model the embodied carbon of up to three concrete mixtures.
An example of the embodied carbon results is shown below:
To see the full emissions factors, assumptions and calculations, download a copy of the ICE database. The excel version of the concrete embodied carbon calculator is included in the freely available ICE database download file.
Using the Concrete Embodied Carbon Calculator
Simply enter details of the concrete mixture, in terms of the material constituents per m3, click calculate, then download the optional pdf report.
If you are working on a specific building, it may help to have the concrete design certificate from your concrete supplier. This will tell you exactly what is in your concrete per m3, in terms of cement, CEM I, ggbs, pfa, aggregates, additives…etc. Using the actual concrete mixture increases accuracy of embodied carbon assessments considerably.
View an example of the pdf output, embodied carbon concrete report.
The boundaries of this calculator is cradle to site. It can also model cradle to gate, if you set the transport distance to site as zero.
The concrete embodied carbon calculator is below:
To reset the calculator, just refresh the page.
