When you discuss embodied carbon, people generally want material has the least embodied carbon and that included me. Having started to read into whole life carbon, I understand that the product stage (cradle to gate, A1-A3) is just part of it. What happens through the life of the building, has a large impact.

But I think people need to understand the differences in scale to start having those discussions. So, I made this small diagram of the main materials and their embodied carbon per meter cubed.

Often it is shown as per kg, but I wanted to be able to size elements and be able to convert them to embodied carbon without having to find their densities.

I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this.