A beta-version of a new, free tool that is designed to provide the data necessary to prioritise low-carbon products and make environmentally responsible decisions earlier in the design and construction process of buildings has been launched by non-profit, Building Transparency.
Tally Climate Action Tool (tallyCAT), has been developed in collaboration with Perkins&Will and C-Change Labs, and funded by the Province of British Columbia, and works Building Transparency’s building information modeling (BIM) software, Revit.
The tallyCAT beta marks an important milestone for the building and construction industry, as it is being launched at a time when attention to embodied carbon reduction is a growing priority. The tool provides designers with real-time information on material performance and carbon impacts via direct access to the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator’s (EC3’s) global database of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) – the primary pathway for manufacturers to communicate the environmental impacts of their products. It will also integrate directly into Revit, saving designers time and allowing them to scale up.
“Our team at Building Transparency is hyper-focused on providing the tools and resources needed to help the built environment industry understand, measure, and reduce its embodied carbon emissions,” said Stacy Smedley, executive director at Building Transparency. “The tallyCAT beta tool is another step for us in providing a robust ecosystem of tools to enable action and the prioritisation of low-carbon design and procurement decisions. With this new tool, we are able to meet designers where they are in Revit and provide the data necessary to drive green specification and procurement.”
The tallyCAT team says that it aims to ignite widespread change in the building, design, and construction sectors. “We are co-developing tallyCAT with the aspiration of bringing low-carbon product selection into the design process, developing data-informed workflows that can become integral to every project,” said Jesce Walz, a designer and carbon leader at Perkins&Will. “Our team is focused on leveraging the power of open access tools and collaborative partnerships to improve our industry’s environmental impacts.”
The team at Building Transparency launched the tool at Greenbuild Conference and Expo, where they lead demos of the technology and participated in panel discussions and sessions about embodied carbon, low-carbon procurement, and the need for material innovations within the built environment sector.
