Between the increasingly rigorous environmental regulations and our clients’ internal sustainability mandates, there is a growing focus on reducing embodied carbon to achieve net-zero emissions in the AEC industry. At the municipal level, sustainability objectives are becoming more robust and clearly defined with carbon reporting requirements. Gaby Kalapos, Clean Air Partnership’s Executive Director and public sector panelist at the Carbon Coalition Conference, emphasized: “We can’t manage what we can’t measure”, underscoring the importance of government-supported data collection through Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).
At KIRKOR, our commitment to sustainability and responsible design led us to develop carbon specifications ahead of enforced regulations. This foresight, combined with two decades of experience of BIM (Building Information Modeling), has established the technological foundation we utilize to lead, innovate and bring more value to our clients and precisely target their sustainability goals.
Our Digital Practice team has focused on advancing BIM with KIRKOR-developed tools, curated content libraries, and efficient workflows. This innovation boosts our technological edge, allowing us to produce accurate 3D simulations that bring design and construction solutions to life. By harnessing the full power of BIM—integrating geometry, spatial data, and quantities—we deliver valuable programming insights that help our clients visualize outcomes and make more environmentally-conscious, informed decisions.
How BIM + LCA Unlock Data-Driven Development
As environmental regulations evolve, we continuously refine how we program our models to uncover and evaluate sustainable design possibilities. Through our research and testing, BIM’s interoperability with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools is a critical step in quantifying the environmental factors associated with products, including resource consumption, emissions, and waste generation, across all stages of its life.
BIM provides detailed quantities on material specifications, while LCA evaluates their environmental impact, tracking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of all products across the building’s life cycle within the model. By integrating BIM with LCA, KIRKOR takes a data-driven approach to embodied carbon reduction in our buildings, directly informing our Specification-Based Strategy. The resulting metrics allow us to make intentional material selections that reduce embodied carbon and bridge the information gaps we call the “Carbon Disconnect.”
Early Integration of BIM and LCA for Sustainable Design
KIRKOR implements BIM Project Execution Plans (BIM PxPs) as a standard of practice on every project, guiding our processes and how we track and execute our clients’ goals. As part of this approach, sustainability targets are identified to activate a specific “BIM Use” in our BIM PxPs (See Figure 1). This, in turn, shifts the structure and organization of our model to accurately assess materials and their quantities, prompting earlier collaboration with our sustainability consultants.
Timely activation of this BIM Use is critical for optimal results. Engaging too early in the design model provides limited feedback for LCA due to its insufficient Level of Development (LOD). On the other hand, delaying LCA implementation to later stages can result in either unnecessary rework or constrain the project’s ability to meet its embodied carbon targets.
To achieve accurate quantification, we collaborate with our sustainability partners to set and incorporate these targets in the pre-design phase. Building from this approach, construction management teams are also consulted earlier to provide crucial layers of information to ensure our models are optimized for construction phasing. This consensus-based approach allows us to layer in the information appropriately, continuously, and build from these layers from a project’s onset.
From pre-design to construction management, there’s much more to learn about BIM’s capabilities and how it works hand-in-hand with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Stay tuned for our next blog, where we delve into the practical applications of BIM in sustainability, revealing how KIRKOR is improving the processes of material selection and decision making, value engineering, and looking to the future to support sustainability in construction and the built environment through BIM.
Author: Jeremy McMartin, Director of Digital Practice, KIRKOR Architects and Planners
