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Carbo Life Calculator

The Free and Open Source Embodied Carbon Calculator for Revit

What is Carbo Life Calculator?

Carbo Life Calculator is an embodied carbon calculator for the built environment. The application transforms quantities of materials, from Revit, or manually specified to calculate the embodied carbon. Carbo Life Calculator will automatically find available embodied carbon data from EPDs or various databases and map these to your design. Thus giving you almost instantaneous results.

What is embodied carbon?

In short it’s the full amount of CO2 that will be in the atmosphere after your building has been built, used and demolished. Embodied carbon is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (often simplified to “carbon”) generated to produce a built asset. This includes emissions caused by extraction, manufacture/processing, transportation and assembly of every product and element in an asset. In some cases, (depending on the boundary of an assessment), it may also include the maintenance, replacement, deconstruction, disposal and end-of-life aspects of the materials and systems. Source: UK-GBC EC Developing Client.

Why do we need to know this?

Like many other factors of a building (total net area, building cost, volume, value etc) we now often also want to know what the embodied carbon cost is of a building design. Sometimes for legislative permission, but in general it will help to understand its impact on climate change, or better: the "damage" a project will do to the environment. Knowing this value will aid design choices that can reduce its impact. It can also help us to better calculate a way to offset the carbon that it releases into the atmosphere. Certain design choices have a bigger impact than others and being able to quickly and effectively calculate this value is vital to ensure that your design will not impact the environment more than is needed.

Why use Carbo Life Calculator?

Carbo Life Calc is a tool that offers users a free and open-source solution to calculate the embodied carbon of a building design. It's designed to link into Autodesk Revit. Making this tool freely available for all will be key in creating awareness in the built environment.

Contribute to Carbo Life Calculator project

Carbo Life Calculator is a free and open source software. If you enjoy the software and would like to contribute to the project, you can do so by:

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Click below to download from Github or the Autodesk App Store for free.



Help files and resources

Github development page
Github Wiki
Help PDF

See how it works