Tally LCA Software to Include Product-Specific Data

The nonprofit Building Transparency—holder of the EC3 tool that allows comparison of building products’ carbon footprints—recently added the popular life-cycle assessment (LCA) app Tally to its portfolio. And now, armed with a big grant, Tally and EC3’s environmental product declaration (EPD) database will be integrated into a new, open-access version of Tally: the Tally Climate Action Tool (tallyCAT). This is big news in the embodied carbon world because, for the first time, product-level embodied carbon information will be at designers’ fingertips as they are building their models. 

The best of two tools

The tallyCAT tool will leverage the capabilities of Tally and EC3’s EPD database directly within building information modeling (BIM) programs like Revit—centralizing capabilities that have previously been separate. Tally has long been used to estimate a building’s embodied impacts, but it wasn’t product specific. EC3 is product specific, in that it contains a database of EPDs, but it wasn’t as accessible to use in design. As a result, the two tools are currently used at different points in the design process.