If you’re pursuing CaGBC Zero Carbon Building certification, the embodied carbon piece is part of your scope.
The Zero Carbon Building Design Standard, version 4, gives you two ways to comply.
- Path one is an intensity target: your embodied carbon can’t exceed 425 kilograms of CO2e per square metre for most building types, or 350 for warehouses and distribution centres.
- Path two is a baseline comparison: at least 10% better than a functionally equivalent baseline building.
You pick whichever path fits your project. The Life Cycle Assessment itself has to follow the National Research Council’s National Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner’s Guide. That means a full cradle-to-grave assessment, upfront carbon (manufacturing, transport, installation), use-stage carbon (maintenance, repair, replacement), and end-of-life carbon (demolition, disposal, recycling), focused on your structural and envelope materials specifically.
The timing detail: this LCA has to happen at the Construction Documents stage, not early schematic design. By the time you’re running the numbers, your structural system and envelope assemblies are essentially locked. This means the LCA needs to be accurate to what’s actually going to be built, not a rough early estimate.
What you submit is the ZCB Design v4 Workbook, filled out with your compliance path and supporting documentation. Worth knowing: carbon offsets aren’t required for Design certification. They become mandatory later if you move on to ZCB Performance, but that’s a separate conversation.
We handle the whole-building LCA piece specifically, and integrate our work seamlessly with your energy modeler, architectural drawings, structural engineer, and everyone else already in the certification process. Our clients tell us that collaboration is exactly where we stand out, you can see it in our Google reviews. We’ve completed more than 150 whole-building LCAs following the NRCan Guidelines, and we’ve won multiple Embodied Carbon Awards and a Canadian Trailblazer recognition at the BUILD Sustainable Building Awards along the way.
Got more questions? We’ve answered the ones we hear most often here.
Request a project-specific scope and fee, and we’ll tell you exactly what we need from your team to get started.
