Free Estimator for Solutions for Construction Pollution
Here is a free estimator. It’s an excel spreadsheet.
Any developer, builder, designer, consultant, council or person may use it to estimate the pollution and impact caused by their project.
Once you’ve estimated the impact the estimator suggests how you may offset the impact by investing in carbon farming and by turning food waste into soil.
When we build projects we use water, energy, food and other resources. We sometimes use more resources than the operation of the building.
For example, excavation and road and footpath construction uses large amounts of energy and water. The bigger the excavation and road the more pollution.
The calculator is incomplete; water is yet to be added – keep an eye on this blog for the update. It’s easy to expand for different resources and projects. If you have problems do email me and I’ll help you.
There’s interesting information in the calculator and the sources it relies on.
For example, it says for every 1 litre of petrol (which incidentally has a similar weight to water, so around approx. 1kg/litre), the CO2 going out the exhaust pipe, after combustion, weighs 2.30kg? You may not have questioned it if it said 2.30kg per 100 litres or per 100 kilometres. But it just doesn’t sound right, does it?
The reason the CO2 emissions per litre burned are greater than the mass of fuel is because a significant amount of oxygen from the atmosphere is added to the fuel during the combustion process. The combustion process causes this oxygen to be “converted” into CO2 along with particulates from the fuel source.
Enjoy, give me feedback and have fun and profits with your project.
My thanks to Mat Faint for working with me to develop the calculator.
M
PS: I’ve written about the calculator in my column, Bathurst Burr, which I write for The Fifth Estate: visit it here:
Michael, Sounds great, but where is the download link please??
Hi Michael,
Great work publishing a simple tool for people to use. Being pretty basic, it is simple enough for people to use easily and probably good enough for most small projects. I would point out however, that it is really a carbon calculator, not a pollution or environmental impact calculator. It only estimates carbon emissions associated with construction activities (which is a great start). It does not quantify other environmental impacts. You would need to move towards more of a full lifecycle analysis (LCA) methodology to achieve that. Most LCA methodologies incorporate estimation of 11 other environmental impacts beyond carbon emissions (e.g. ozone depletion, resource depletion, human and eco-toxicity, water use, land use, eutrophication, photochemical smog, soil salinisation). There is a tendency these days to equate environment with carbon and this can be quite misleading.