Insight
Skanska joined forces with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to develop Insight, a program that harnesses the power of USGBC’s rich database of LEED® projects to empower you to make the best decisions for your project. During design charrettes, our team works with our clients to map an owner’s aspirations for energy, water and waste savings on their project. Then, using Insight, we compare your goals with available information on current energy, water and waste performance of LEED-certified buildings within a specified geographic region. You can use this data to identify the right sustainability strategy for your building. To start using Insight, visit this link.
Insight has also been used by cities to guide and inform their green building policy. Allowing them to understand their current performance and inspiring them to set new standards to get them where they’d like to be.
The EC3 Tool
As buildings become more energy efficient, we see an opportunity to focus on reducing embodied carbon—or the emissions associated with building construction, including extracting, transporting and manufacturing materials. There are a number of ways to address embodied carbon. With techniques, such as design alterations that reduce load, changing the quantity of materials used, or choosing materials that are sourced locally or have lower embodied carbon, we can reduce a project’s carbon footprint before operation even begins. Skanska co-conceived and seed-funded a first-of-its-kind tool to track embodied carbon data for commonly used construction materials. The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool, developed with the Carbon Leadership Forum, is being used on all of our Skanska USA Commercial Development projects, and empowers our preconstruction teams to compare emissions and embodied carbon levels for proposed project materials.
You can find the EC3 tool here.