Step-by-step: Creating an LCA for a paving block with white cement and pigments (FEBE)

This guide covers the main steps required to perform an LCA and obtain an EPD of a prebuilt concrete product, used by the Concrete Belgian Federation. We use a paving block with white cement and pigments to illustrate the example

Connect to Pilario

To create an LCA for our prebuilt concrete products, we need to connect to Pilario where we will provide our username and password.

Creating the paving block from a template

Once we have connected to Pilario we will be brought to the main page which, by default, lists the products we have defined in our system. You can navigate to other assets via the left bar menu. 

If this is your first time using the system, the list might be empty. Don't worry, we are about to create our first product. Follow these steps:

1. Click in the upper right corner button, Add a product.
2. Define the basic product attributes like name, external id, model, template and label.
   1. Name is mandatory, in this case we will use Red paving block but you can give the name you want
   2. External id can be left empty, it will usually be an internal reference used in your company and/or other systems.
   3. In this guide we are using the model FEBE, that will be selected automatically if you choose a template, you can read more about it in our knowledge base.
      Note that depending on your licence and/or user permissions you might see less models available in the list.
   4. Template, we advice selecting one of the 54 available templates as this will prepopulate many attributes of the product saving you a lot of time while assesing the environmental impact. In this example we are using the Paving block with white cement and pigments one.
      You can read more about the available predefined concrete products in the article The functional unit (FEBE model)
   5. Labels can be used to categorise products or help searching for them in the future. You can add as many as you want, but can also be left empty.
3. Click on Add product

After clicking on Add product you will be brough to the product's page.  There we can define other attributes like a description and pictures.

On the left side bar you will see all the life stages of the product like Ingredients, Packaging, Manufacturing, etc, if you are familiar with LCA you will find that these stages differ slightly from the typical ones Raw Materials, Production, Use, etc this is to match the requirements of the EN15804+A2 standard, there is more information about this in the The concrete (FEBE) model page.

Defining other product attributes

In the product description section, there are other important attributes that will impact the calculations or be used in the EPD generated report. They can be found in the Description section, after the General attributes under the Prodcut description, Functional Unit (FU) and declared product and  Information for EPD report. To see them, you can scroll down or collapse the General section.

In this example we will just verify that the values prepopulated by the template are matching our product.

Defining the block ingredients

We need to define the ingredients (materials) that compose our paving block. We will navigate to the Ingredients (A1-A2) section on the left. In a real case, we will likely have to modify many other components, but in this example, we are going to simply decrease the amount of Titanium dioxide and add some Iron oxide. 

To modify the ingredients, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Ingredients (A1-A2) section, locate the Pigments - Titanium dioxide and reduce the quantity used from 0.014 to 0.004 kg. Also use the ➕ Add row button in the upper right corner to add 0.01 kg of Iron dioxide. We will also specify that the distance traveled from the provided is 150 kms by track for both components.
   
   If you prefer, you could click on the ➕ button on the left menu, once per component you wanted to add, and you will see as well how the list of ingredients enlarges accordingly on the left menu, and how a new row is added in the Table view in the main section. 
   
2. For each ingredient, you could define seveal attributes, noting the following
   1. The first column contains several buttons () to perform actions like

1. 1. 1. Opening the ingredient in single view (see section below)
      2. Duplicate the ingredient
      3. Delete the ingredient
   2. Name: is the name of the ingredient.
   3. Type (A1): is the type ingredient. You can select from a list of ingredients used in the produce of concrete such as concrete and non-concrete ingredients, and manufacturing materials.
   4. Weight of final product (A1): the weight in kgs of the ingredient used.
   5. The payload distance travelled (in different types of transport) from the producer to our manufacturing location.
   You should end up with a formula like the one presented in the image below.

Single view for the ingredients

By clicking on the first button of the actions column, you could reach the indiviual definintion of each ingredient. This view doesn't include any information not contained in the table view but might be the preferred way of displaying ingredients in some uses cases.

Another way of reaching the single view for an ingredient is by expanding the Ingredients (A1-A2) section on the left menu, and clicking on the specific ingredient as shown in the image below.

Adding the packaging of the paving block

In the same way we have added the ingredients of the product, we need to add the packaging of the product. In some templates you might find that a packaging has already been included for your paving. It is the case in our example where a Pallet wood is already present. Additionally, we are going to add a plastic film to wrap the paving blocks.

Follow these steps to add the film:

1. Navigate to the Packaging section, and click once the ➕ Add row button.  You will see how a new row is added in the Table view in the main section.
   
   

   As we saw before and if you prefer, you could also use the ➕ button directly on the left menu to add a packaging.

   1. Fill in the name column with Film
   2. Select Tertiary packaging as the Family
   3. Select LDPE as Type
   4. Add 225 as the Units per packaging
   5. Add 0.125 kg as the Unitary weightFill the packaging information, in our example, for the Film we will:
   6. Leave the default values for the other fields.

Adding the manufacturing information

After having defined the ingredients and the packaging, we will focus on our manufacturing process. The parameters related to this stage are located under the Manufacturing (A3) section. There, we can add the energy consumption related to the manufacturing of our paving block. In this example, we will just check that everything matches the data from our factory. We can see in the image below how by changing a parameter, the tool will automatically calculate and present the amount of energy used for each paving block.

Visualising other information

On the left menu, we can see other stages that correspond to different life stages of the paving block. For the sake of simplicity we will not change anything, but you should verify that the parameters input in every step are input correctly to obtain valid results.

We cover the stages briefly here:

• Delivery (A4): contains information about the trips to construction sites.
• Construction (A5): contains information about materials, energy and losses during the installation of the product.
• Use (B): contains information about the use phase. Please note that many of these are read-only as they are considered as not relevant according to the EN 16757:2017. You can read more about that in the methodological report document.
• End-of-life (C): contains information about the end-of-life. All the parameters are predefined and cannot be modified by the end user.
• Benefits (D): contains information about the benefits obtained from reuse, recycling and recovery.

Viewing the results

At any time in the process we can see the impacts of our paving block in the results tab. To open the results tab you can click on the Show results button in the upper right (also available via the arrow in the upper right corner) which will expand the results column.

The results' column contains four tabs which allow us to display the results in different ways: a grid, a grouped per modules table, a graph, and a stacked graph.

• By default, the results will display the Grid tab and the Global Warming Potential - Total indicator, but we could select any LCA indicator that we wanted in that grid. We can see them aggregated by stages, and it gives a clear overview of which stage, or Ingredient, or Packaging have a bigger impact.
• The Modules view, presents a similar view but groups by specific modules instead of per stage.
• The Graph and Stacked chart, will present the results in a visual way, allowing the user to see the Grid values in different visual charts.

That's it, you have managed to get the impacts from a paving block created from a template...  Congratulations on making it until here!

Do you want to explore further what you could do from here?

• You could play with the parameters of your product to see how those will affect the impacts and create a more environmentally friendly version of your block. This is covered in the specific guide Step-by-step guide: making a scenario for a red paving block. See you there!
• You could generate an EPD report to share with third parties. This is covered in the article How to generate an EPD report for your product.