Skanska Proptech Hackathon – One Click LCA team
won the CO2 footprint challenge

Skanska, a multinational construction and development company from Sweden, and Proptech Romania invited start-ups, researchers, tech professionals, and established professionals to participate in six challenges.

Without a doubt, One Click LCA joined to compete for one of the presented challenges. Not only have we won in the CO2 footprint challenge but One Click LCA team was also awarded for the overall performance in Skanska Proptech Hackathon with a custom-made title “The most promising future partner”.

The first objective of the CO2 footprint challenge was to create an online platform to run the calculation of the CO2 that will help market players easily understand how design decisions affect building footprint and let them easily navigate through life-cycle assessment in order to meet the 2050 net zero carbon target.

The second goal of the challenge was to create an easy embodied carbon calculator for carbon-intense construction materials which would generate data that could be easily accessible from life-cycle assessment software.

Why should the construction industry care about this challenge?

One of the important factors is the fact that the investors set very ambitious targets for construction companies and actively choose to invest only in sustainable projects. The construction giants have to reach those target no matter what and embodied carbon calculations is a very efficient way to ensure the sustainable performance of a project.

Secondly, construction industry becomes more and more tied by the governments in the amount of emissions it produces. A lot of European countries either already have building regulations or they are coming to action soon, among the pioneers are the governments of France, Germany, Netherlands, and Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark). Apart from that, European Commission’s regulations are coming in place covering one construction material at a time.

Corporations start putting sustainability as the most important priority to focus on while conducting business. And the pioneer companies that fulfill regulations and pave the way for sustainability are becoming global advocates for climate change fight.

What solutions do we propose?

Our solution for the educational platform is focusing on the early design stages when the designer has a lot of decision power. For that we recommend the Carbon Designer tool, a concept phase carbon software, which is very easy and intuitive to use and allows easy design optioneering.

Carbon Designer was initially built upon assignment from Statsbygg, the Norwegian state property agency, and recently a free version of the tool was made available for the whole Finnish residential construction sector.

For the product CO2 calculations, our solution focused on the use of simplified and pre-verified calculators that will generate automatic results and upload them to LCA software making it available for future work. This automated tool will reduce 90% of manual work time and will be a very cost-efficient option compared to traditional EPDs.

We at One Click LCA have already developed such a calculator for the French concrete industry, it is called BETie. BETie is fully integrated into One Click LCA and the data it generates is available for our users. Learn more about BETie here.

Furthermore, our team demonstrated how we can support Skanska in creating “profit with purpose” by adding carbon and social cost criteria in the material procurement process, and we explained why One Click LCA is Skanska’s Most Promising Future Partner!

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