3cea Joins Engineers Ireland’s Sustainability Grand Tour
On February 25th 3cea joined Engineers Ireland’s Sustainability Grand Tour to present our Housing 4.0E initiative. The speakers for the event were John Carley, Alexandra Hamilton, and Ralf Kampe from 3cea, Sean Savage from Wexford County Council, and Colm Callery from Engineers Ireland.
The focus of the webinar was to discuss the aims of the H4.0E project, what it hopes to deliver, how it will achieve these goals, and to provide details from one of our sites in Wexford. One of the key objectives of this project is to reduce CO2 emissions in construction of houses by 60%. These Carbon emissions are known as ‘embodied’ and ‘operational’ CO2eq emissions. Operational emissions are those generated by running a building and “upfront ‘embodied’ emissions are generated by construction of a building. After a lifespan of 50 years, the upfront embodied CO2eq makes up 46% of the total CO2eq emissions and the operational emissions makes up 54% of the total CO2eq emissions. This shows that both categories are equally important and so we need to focus on the upfront CO2eq emissions as well.
Figure 1: Source: ©2016 2030, Inc. / Architecture 2030. All Rights Reserved. Data Source: Richard Stein, CBECS (2003).
To reduce these GHG emissions during construction, H4.0E looks to reduce carbon emissions by working with low carbon construction types and trying to use as much low carbon renewable building materials as possible. Factors such as low carbon design, logistics and procurement, materials, and insulation are all considered when designing these properties. By the project end, there are hopes that a digital platform will become available to perspective home builders to develop the plans for their property and estimate the cost and CO2eq emissions using the manufacture for assembly model. It is hoped this platform will also help reduce costs when building homes.
Engineers Ireland’s Sustainability Grand Tour is a series of webinars commencing on 20 January 2021 and consisting of approximately 12 webinars and panel discussions taking place throughout January to April. This series will seek to educate and empower engineers across all sectors to be drivers of climate action and will focus on topics ranging from road design to sustainable housing and energy efficient design. See below for a full list of the planned events and check out their YouTube channel for past events.
To learn more about 3cea’s activities in the Housing 4.0E initiative see here.
