According to a WBGC study, buildings are responsible for 39 percent of global energy related carbon emissions, with 11 percent from materials and construction. Further, a global 2024 study by One Click LCA demonstrates that up to 90 percent of construction professionals see insufficient product environmental data as an impediment to selecting lower-carbon materials in their projects.

To solve this challenge, One Click LCA has now launched the Materials Compass. Materials Compass gives designers, engineers, and specifiers access to the world’s largest construction life-cycle assessment (LCA) database, showing the environmental impact of more than 250,000 construction products. With comprehensive global data, Materials Compass helps construction industry professionals make more data-driven decisions throughout the design and construction process, select lower-carbon materials, and ultimately reduce carbon emissions from construction projects — via verified environmental product declarations (EPDs) and other product sustainability data.

“We want to embed decarbonization into the design and construction process, instead of it being an afterthought. Materials Compass brings all the global EPDs together for designers, buyers, and specifiers. This makes finding and choosing lower-carbon and sustainable materials easy,” says Panu Pasanen, the CEO & Founder of One Click LCA.

There can be significant differences between materials on the market. According to One Click LCA data, carbon emissions can be more than one-third lower if people select the lowest-carbon materials compared to the highest-carbon choices available. The result is carbon reduction potential for projects that select the lower-carbon options.

In the research cited above, almost 90 percent of construction industry professionals say the lack of EPDs — verified documents that demonstrate a product's environmental impact — is the most limiting factor for LCA and embodied carbon reduction. One of Material Compass's key and first-in-the-industry benefits is that it provides a complete overview of all global EPDs for construction materials on the platform, letting construction industry professionals compare the carbon impact of different materials side-by-side.

“Our goal is to integrate all qualifying construction material data, including EPD, CFP, TM65, and generic datasets, as soon as it's available worldwide. All data undergoes a rigorous quality review by our experts, who leverage AI-based and proprietary tools. Where industry data is lacking, we also produce high-quality generic LCA data for key materials like concrete, steel, wood, glass, plastics, and textiles,” says Jani Tierala, Head of LCA Data at One Click LCA.

The platform brings together data from multiple sources, including EPDs, carbon footprints of products, and generic life-cycle assessment data, making it easier to make informed decisions.

Key features of Materials Compass include:

• Navigate easy, yet advanced, search of a global database
• Find locally-available and lower-carbon materials
• Compare products and find the best lower-carbon materials
• Create and share material specifications
• Scale-up your sustainability initiatives quickly

On Thursday, December 05, One Click LCA is hosting the Winter Sustainability Summit 2024 — the world’s largest online event about how materials selection can drive decarbonization of the construction industry. Registration is free and open to the public, streaming in 7 time zones to ensure you can attend.