How Sweco Cut Pavement Design Time by 90% with ORIS Plug-In for Infrastructure LCA for Autodesk® Civil 3D®

The context

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Maximising the potential of BIM for sustainable infrastructure

Sweco, one of Europe’s leading engineering and environmental consultancies, set out to embed sustainability earlier in its infrastructure design process. To support this vision, Sweco partnered with ORIS Materials Intelligence to refine and implement the ORIS plug-in for infrastructure LCA, a tool that would integrate carbon insights directly into its Autodesk® Civil 3D® workflows.

It eliminates time-consuming manual calculations and automates the entire carbon assessment process, thus enabling engineers to make infrastructure more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally responsible.

The challenge

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Overcoming the limitations of manual carbon assessments

For years, infrastructure designers relied on cumbersome Excel spreadsheets to assess carbon footprints. This outdated process required engineers to manually extract information from drawings and input it into carbon calculators, leading to inefficiencies, human error, and limited opportunities for proactive carbon reduction.

These manual workflows turned carbon assessments into a box-ticking exercise instead of empowering designers to explore lower-carbon alternatives. Sweco recognised the need for a more dynamic, automated solution to unlock sustainability at the early design stage.

The solution

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The ORIS plug-in for infrastructure LCA for Autodesk® Civil 3D®: A seamless integration between Autodesk & ORIS, providing instant carbon data

The ORIS plug-in for infrastructure LCA transformed Sweco’s approach to carbon assessments by seamlessly integrating design information—including pavement thicknesses, materials, and extents—directly from Autodesk Civil 3D into the ORIS platform. This automation eliminated manual data entry, significantly reducing errors and freeing up designers to focus on optimising carbon reduction strategies.

“The ORIS plug-in for infrastructure LCA for Autodesk® Civil 3D® is a game-changer. What used to take two days now takes less than two hours. We instantly extract data from drawings, cut out manual entry and errors, and optimise carbon and cost in seconds — including rapid calculations and material swaps with a click.”

Stuart Guthrie - Technical Director at Sweco

The customer outcomes

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Unlocking carbon optimisation in the early design stage

• Instant Carbon Insights: The ORIS plug-in enabled Sweco’s design team to immediately assess and optimise carbon footprints within Civil 3D, ensuring sustainable choices from project inception.

• Proactive Sustainability Decision-Making: Rather than validating endless rows of spreadsheets, Sweco’s engineers provided clients with visualised supply chain insights, transport analysis, and real-time dashboards of project KPIs.

• Enhanced Client Engagement: The intuitive ORIS platform allowed Sweco to communicate sustainability opportunities clearly, ensuring decision-makers could act on carbon reduction strategies with confidence.

Making carbon reduction accessible to non-engineers

With our plug-in, Sweco’s team could clearly demonstrate carbon reduction opportunities to clients without relying on technical explanations.

The visual, intuitive display of data made the impact of design choices immediately understandable, to non-engineers. This was a catalyst in meetings with stakeholders whose top concern was carbon.

They saw tangible, actionable insights that showed exactly what they could act on to reduce emissions. It turned complex metrics into a clear, shared goal.

“The ORIS plug-in for infrastructure LCA for Autodesk® Civil 3D makes® it easy for clients to understand how carbon benefits can quickly be realised. It simplifies complex data, helping decision-makers confidently take action on carbon reduction.”