Let’s be clear. If concrete were a country it would be the third most polluting country in the world. So why is nobody pointing fingers at this industry?
Finally, a carbon calculator addressing this issue. Taking on the real estate industry head on.
Design Studio SOUR aims to raise awareness of the industry’s carbon footprint by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions of constructed spaces and all of the supply chain activities.
The studio has made the tool public as they want to encourage all businesses, small or large, to start taking action.
The calculator allows SOUR to then offset the projects CO2 through Cool Effect— a non profit organization matching 90% of donations to carbon reducing projects.
“We have many interior architecture projects we work on, and so we couldn’t use any of the existing tools for those. We wanted to create a tool that estimates the footprint based on the overall process,” said Pinar Guvenc, Partner of SOUR.
The calculating method
SOUR carbon calculator is cradle to (construction site) gate scope. This corresponds with Module A1 to A3 in the EU standards.This tool incorporates the Carbon Leadership Forum’s global Embodied Carbon Benchmark Database (ECBD) of over 1,000 existing buildings.
