ECHO Publications Aim to Standardize Whole-Building LCA

Over the last few years, many different organizations have developed programs and processes to address embodied carbon of entire projects: buildings, site work, and infrastructure. But embodied carbon champions became concerned that divergent methods and assumptions would slow the adoption of project LCAs, as owners might hesitate to invest in the process without confidence that their work would be broadly accepted.

With funding from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and others, Architecture 2030 convened a group of North American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the spring of 2023. The group agreed to seek alignment across their programs and chose to call itself the Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization Project, or ECHO. (Disclosure: BuildingGreen was contracted with SERA Architects to facilitate and support the early stages of this alignment effort in the summer of 2023.)

Led by the Carbon Leadership Forum, ECHO published the result of this collaboration, “Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements: ECHO Recommendations for Alignment,” on the ECHO website in early October 2024.

The Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements report identifies ten topic areas that need alignment, including which impact categories and life-cycle stages to include in project LCAs and what the reference period or assumed project life should be. It also delves into how to factor in materials reuse and address biogenic carbon calculations. For each of the ten areas, the report specifies an “absolute minimum” and a “strongly recommended” approach, and lists “future considerations” to address as the field continues to mature.

This report references 29 different standards and programs and lays out in a detailed appendix how each one addresses the ten topic areas. (Further disclosure: the Contractor’s Commitment, a program run by BuildingGreen’s Sustainable Construction Leaders network, is one of the 29.)

The effort behind the Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements report was coordinated with Building Transparency’s work to standardize a data schema for reporting the results of project LCAs. This schema defines the specific fields a project LCA database should use so the data can be shared between systems. Building Transparency’s resulting documents, the ECHO Reporting Schema and its companion guide, were published on the ECHO website in September 2024. Taken together, the schema and the Project Life Cycle Assessment Requirements report go a long way toward standardizing expectations for project-level embodied carbon reporting.

More on LCA and building decarbonization

Building Decarbonization: How LCA and EPDs Fit in

Building Decarbonization: Learn the Lingo

For more information:

Embodied Carbon Harmonization and Optimization Project (ECHO)

www.echo-project.info