Bentley Systems has announced the availability of integrated workflows for lifecycle assessment (LCA) and embodied carbon calculation capabilities in the Bentley iTwin platform.
The integration is a result of Bentley’s collaboration with One Click LCA Ltd., a developer of construction sector lifecycle assessment and environmental product declaration software.
The software can be used for buildings, infrastructure, renovations, construction products and materials, and portfolios. The One Click LCA platform is used in more than 100 countries by manufacturers, consultants, designers, contractors, and investors to decarbonise the entire construction value chain.
Bentley Systems aims to empower its users to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs), particularly addressing climate action and decarbonising infrastructure. It expects infrastructure digital twin solutions will be an essential enabler and accelerator of carbon transparency and disclosure use cases, and that the adoption of digital twin solutions will help accelerate the transformation of infrastructure performance.
“We are excited to see developers in the Bentley iTwin platform ecosystem tackling sustainability and carbon reduction challenges,” director of product management, Bentley iTwin platform, Kaustubh Page said.
“Tracking the environmental impact of an infrastructure project involves a constant stream of design changes coming from various engineering disciplines,” Page said.
“By unifying these data streams, users can quickly create a quantity takeoff report at the right aggregation level required for LCA calculations while reducing the lifecycle assessment workflow from weeks to hours. We are excited to see engineering firms build fully automated lifecycle assessment workflows for their infrastructure projects.”
A typical lifecycle analysis can be time consuming, especially when manually exporting and aggregating data from bills of quantity and bills of material. It can also be error-prone, requiring additional verification of successful ingestion by LCA tools.
The One Click LCA integration creates time savings and improves accuracy. Users can incorporate engineering data created by diverse design tools into a single view using the Bentley iTwin platform, generate a unified report of materials and quantities and share it with One Click LCA via cloud synchronisation. This integration gives users the ability to analyse environmental footprints, accelerate environmental reporting, perform project optioneering, and optimise the selection of materials and products.
Rodrigo Fernandes, director ES(D)G (empowering sustainable development goals), said infrastructure engineers are at the forefront of disrupting climate change.
“And our collective conscious is that climate change and its effects won’t be solved without strong collaboration and ecosystem partnerships,” Fernandes said.
“One Click LCA can actively contribute by helping our users accelerate their low-carbon pathways—adopting low-carbon materials and products, minimising resource consumption, and optimising structural design—in every type of infrastructure, not just vertical infrastructure.”
Panu Pasanen, CEO, One Click LCA Ltd., said the company os pleased to work with Bentley Systems to automate carbon accounting and reduction.
“Bentley’s focus in civil engineering and infrastructure with this integration make automated lifecycle assessment finally a reality also for public works,” Pasanen said.
“This partnership allows infrastructure designers and contractors, as well as contracting authorities anywhere in the world, to coordinate, calculate, and reduce carbon, as well as other environmental impacts of their projects. The speed and ease of the automation will also be greatly appreciated by projects pursuing third-party environmental certifications, such as PAS 2080, CEEQUAL, Envision, LEED, and BREEAM or regulatory tools. We keep working with Bentley to develop further innovations in this space, such as circularity assessment tools.”