Embodied carbon calculation for geosynthetic products and implication for engineering projects
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Geosynthetic products are widely used in construction projects. Although many studies have demonstrated that geosynthetic solutions result in lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to traditional methods, precise embodied carbon (EC) values for geosynthetic products are scarce. In addition, the EC values of geosynthetics are sometimes substituted with primary raw material data in project carbon footprint calculations, which undermines the credibility of their sustainability claims. This paper reviews EC calculation methods for geosynthetics and provides a geogrid case example. It then extracts EC values from 120 Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to propose representative values for geosynthetic products in different regions and recalculates the carbon footprints of geosynthetic-reinforced projects using maximum EC values to assess their impact on project-level estimates. The results show that emissions accumulated during the manufacturing stage of geosynthetic products account for nearly 30% of their total EC. However, the EC of geosynthetic products contributes only a small portion of the total EC of geosynthetic-reinforced projects. Even with higher EC values, geosynthetic solutions remain more sustainable than conventional alternatives. The calculation method presented in this paper enables geosynthetic companies to estimate product EC without commercial life cycle assessment software, while EPD-derived values enhance existing datasets for more accurate carbon footprint calculations in geosynthetic-reinforced projects globally.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it